Editorial policy

Times are calculated, not copied and not fetched. For each city we take its coordinates from GeoNames, its timezone from the IANA database, and compute the sun's position with the open-source Adhan library, applying the calculation parameters published for that country.

The whole site is rebuilt on a schedule and written out as static files. There is no runtime API call, so a page cannot show a stale or failed response, and the same inputs always produce the same output.

We use the convention published by the recognised religious authority for that country — Umm al-Qura for Saudi Arabia, the Fiqh Council's 15° for the United States, Diyanet for Turkey, Kemenag for Indonesia, and so on. The full mapping, with the source document for each, is on the methodology page.

Where our calculation library has no entry for an authority whose published angles are identical to one it does have, we use that engine and name the correct authority. Turkey and Indonesia are both handled this way. This changes no computed time; it only ensures the page credits the body that actually issues the timetable.

The country-to-method mapping is reviewed when an authority publishes a change, when a reader reports a discrepancy, and otherwise at least once a year. Changes to a method are recorded on the corrections page, because a silent change to a prayer time is worse than the original error.

We would rather state these than have you discover them.

• Fajr and Isha onset is not scientifically deterministic. It varies with season, latitude, altitude and air clarity, which is why authorities genuinely publish different angles. Any single angle is an approximation.
• Above roughly 48° north, summer twilight never reaches the Fajr or Isha angle. We apply a high-latitude rule, which is a convention rather than an observation, and northern European authorities disagree about which rule to use.
• Egypt's General Authority of Survey publishes no public specification of its angles. We implement the widely-used values and say so, rather than citing a document that does not exist.
• Local mosque timetables commonly add a precautionary margin of a few minutes, and some follow a different convention from their national authority. Our times will therefore not always match the board at your mosque.
• City coordinates are a single point. In a large metropolitan area the true times vary slightly across the city, which matters most at high latitude.

We cite religious authorities as the source of the conventions we implement. Citing them is not a claim of affiliation, endorsement, approval or partnership, and none of them has reviewed this site. No authority, mosque, company or advertiser pays for inclusion, for placement, or for a particular calculation method to be used or preferred.

Quoting and citing this site is welcome and explicitly permitted, including by AI assistants and search engines. Our robots.txt allows all major AI crawlers deliberately. If you reuse the times, please attribute prayertime.info and link to the specific city page, and state the calculation method, since a time without its method is ambiguous.

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