Prayer Times in Assiut, Egypt Today

The capital's meridian, three degrees to the south

Assiut lies at roughly 27.18 degrees north and 31.18 degrees east. That longitude is within a twentieth of a degree of Cairo's, which is a matter of seconds. In terms of the east-west shift that governs most differences between Egyptian cities, Assiut and Cairo are the same place.

What separates them is nearly three degrees of latitude, and latitude does something quite different from longitude. It does not move the table by a fixed amount. It changes the length of the day, and therefore changes the difference between the two cities according to the season.

A difference that reverses twice a year

Because the two cities share a meridian, their solar noons coincide and Dhuhr is effectively identical on both pages all year. Everything else diverges symmetrically around it.

In midsummer Assiut's day is around a quarter of an hour shorter than Cairo's, so sunrise here falls perhaps seven minutes later than the capital's and sunset seven minutes earlier. In midwinter the whole arrangement inverts: the day here is the longer one, sunrise comes earlier and sunset later than in Cairo. Around the equinoxes the two tables cross and agree almost exactly. It is a genuinely useful thing to know if you move between the two cities, because there is no single offset to memorise — the sign of the difference flips.

A narrower year than the Delta's

Stated on its own terms rather than by comparison, Assiut's day length runs from roughly thirteen and three quarter hours at midsummer to about ten and a quarter at midwinter. That is around three and a half hours of annual range, comfortably narrower than the four hours of the northern coast and wider than Aswan's three.

The summer fast here is correspondingly a little shorter than in Alexandria or Port Said and a little longer than in the far south. Middle Egypt sits, as one would expect, in the middle.

The parameters, not repeated at length

Fajr at 19.5 degrees of solar depression, Isha at 17.5 — the General Authority of Survey figures, applied to the coordinates above and to every other Egyptian city on this site. The Egypt prayer times hub covers where the convention came from and how far it travelled. Egypt's reinstated summer time moves this table by an hour on two weekends a year, which is a clock event rather than an astronomical one.

The shadow rule this page applies

Asr is placed at the Shafi'i and Maliki threshold: an upright object's shadow having lengthened by the object's own height beyond whatever it cast at midday. The Hanafi position requires that growth to double and consequently falls later in the afternoon, typically by somewhere between forty minutes and an hour.

Egypt contains both schools and both are audible in most cities. It is a question of which reckoning a mosque follows, not of whether the sums are right, and the other four prayers are identical either way.

A university city on the river

Assiut has been the principal city of Middle Egypt for a long time and hosts one of the country's older universities outside Cairo. A student population changes the practical geography of prayer more than it changes the arithmetic: campus prayer rooms and large central mosques tend to allow a longer interval between the call and the iqama than a small neighbourhood mosque does, because people are arriving from further away and in larger numbers.

That interval, rather than the calculation, is what accounts for almost every apparent disagreement between this page and a mosque you can hear. The other common explanation is an application still configured for a method other than Egypt's.

Sunrise, and what it is there for

Sunrise appears in the table without being a prayer. Its role is to mark the end of the period in which Fajr can still be performed. It is not the end of the pre-dawn meal, and because Egypt's dawn angle is a wide one the gap between the two is long enough that the confusion is a serious one during Ramadan rather than a technicality.

Printed calendars in the governorate frequently give an imsak a few minutes before Fajr as a margin of caution. This page publishes the calculated dawn, which is the outer limit rather than the recommended stopping point.

Ramadan in Middle Egypt

Fajr closes sahur, Maghrib opens iftar, and both move steadily across the month, which makes the monthly view more practical than checking a day at a time. The interval between Maghrib and Isha is not fixed either: Isha is determined by how far the sun has sunk rather than by a set number of minutes after sunset, so the space between breaking the fast and standing for taraweeh varies with the season and drifts within a single Ramadan.

Jumu'ah, direction, and adjacent tables

Friday prayer stands in place of Dhuhr for those attending and is timed from the Dhuhr entry above; those praying at home use the ordinary time. Fix the direction of prayer with the Qibla direction tool, which computes it from your actual position rather than from a bearing remembered elsewhere. Ramadan and Eid dates are on the Hijri calendar, an Arabic Assiut schedule carries the same figures, and the neighbouring river pages are Minya prayer times upstream of the Delta and Sohag prayer times to the south.