CAIRO — In the late 1700s, Fahmy Ali Al-Fishawy established what became Egypt’s most prominent coffee shop in the heart of Islamic Cairo. Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz was one among dozens of novelists, artists, politicians and even presidents who regularly sipped their mint tea and smoked water pipes at the historical, arabesque-styled cafe.

For more than 200 years, Al-Fishawy café, which is listed in almost every Egypt tourist guidebook, never closed before dawn or as long as customers continued to scent the air with fruit-flavored water pipe smoke. But as of December, Al-Fishawy and every other café and restaurant in Egypt will be forced to shut down at 2 a.m. while shops will have to close at midnight. 

Egypt’s government, headed by Prime Minister Hisham Qandil who was appointed by the first democratically elected president, Mohammed Morsi, said the law proposed in October, aims to solve the country’s power crisis which intensified during the summer and left whole neighborhoods living in total darkness for days. Whoever seeks an all-night business will have to obtain a tourist establishment license.

The proposed law infuriated not only shop owners, but also tourism sector workers, cab drivers, multimillion-dollar businesses and customers of all of the above.