Prayer Times in Hama, Syria Today

Forty kilometres from Homs, and under a minute apart

Hama sits at about 35.13 degrees north and 36.76 degrees east, on the Orontes. Homs lies a short distance south at 34.73 north, 36.71 east. The longitude difference between the two is 0.05 degrees — worth roughly twelve seconds of solar time, which does not survive rounding to the minute.

So on any given day the Dhuhr, Asr and Maghrib entries for Hama and Homs will usually be identical. What separates the two tables is latitude, and only slightly: Hama is 0.4 degrees further north, which shows up as a marginally longer summer day and a marginally shorter winter one. Across most of the year the difference is a minute or two at Fajr and Isha, and nothing at all in between.

What the norias cannot tell you

The wooden norias on the Orontes are the thing Hama is known for, and they have been lifting water here for centuries. They are also a reminder of how time was actually kept before published tables: by the sun, by shadows, and by direct observation of the sky.

The table above works differently. It is astronomical, computed from coordinates for a level and unobstructed horizon, and it does not adjust for the river valley, for buildings, or for anything you can see from a particular spot. That is the standard convention everywhere and it is the one the mosques here follow too, which is why the calculated figure and the local call stay in step.

The Syrian settings

Fajr is taken at 19.5 degrees of solar depression and Isha at 17.5, the Egyptian General Authority of Survey convention applied to every Syrian city on this site and explained on the Syria prayer times hub.

Syria has not adjusted its clocks seasonally since 2022, remaining on UTC+3 all year. The practical consequence is that a monthly calendar printed here holds from the first day to the last with no hour to account for, and that any winter table produced before that change reads an hour earlier than the current figures.

Asr and the length of a shadow

This page publishes the majority threshold: Asr opens once a vertical object's shadow has lengthened by one additional object-height beyond its shortest measure at midday. Hanafi reckoning waits for a second object-height, arriving something like forty minutes to an hour later.

Both positions are present in Syria and both are properly grounded. The table has to commit to one figure, and it uses the one the regional convention assumes. Anyone following the Hanafi rule will want their app set accordingly rather than treating the difference as an error.

Where sunrise fits

Sunrise appears in the table because it closes the Fajr window, not because a prayer falls then. It is often mistaken during Ramadan for the moment the fast begins; that moment is Fajr, and with a 19.5-degree dawn angle it comes a good deal earlier.

An inland city and the range of its year

At just over thirty-five degrees north, daylight in Hama runs from roughly nine and three-quarter hours at the winter solstice to around fourteen and three-quarters at the summer one. That is a wider swing than Damascus sees and a narrower one than Aleppo, which fits Hama's position between them.

Because Isha depends on an angle rather than on a fixed interval after sunset, the evening space between Maghrib and Isha also changes with the season — noticeably longer in summer than in winter. It is not a constant that can be planned around all year.

Fasting on the Orontes

The fasting day runs from Fajr to Maghrib. Both boundaries move steadily across the thirty days, so the monthly view is the sensible one to open at the start of the month rather than reading a single day and extrapolating.

An imsak announced a few minutes before the calculated Fajr is common practice in mosques as a precautionary margin. This page gives the astronomical time and leaves the margin to you. Anyone using a table brought from Homs will find it accurate here, which is not true of one brought from Aleppo or the coast.

Jumu'ah in a central Syrian city

For those attending, the Friday gathering stands in place of Dhuhr and is timed from the Dhuhr figure above. The interval between the call and the start of the khutbah is set locally and differs between mosques. Anyone praying at home does Dhuhr at the listed time as usual.

When the app and the mosque disagree

Two settings account for nearly every discrepancy people report. The first is the calculation method: an app left on a Muslim World League or Karachi default is not using Syria's 19.5 and 17.5 angles and will drift by several minutes at Fajr and Isha. The second is the Asr rule, which can differ by the best part of an hour.

A third possibility is the clock itself. Apps and operating systems that have not taken on Syria's post-2022 timekeeping rule can be an hour out in winter. If the disagreement is exactly sixty minutes, that is where to look first.

Qibla and companion Syrian pages

Use the Qibla direction tool to determine the direction from your own position; it calculates the great-circle bearing from the coordinates you provide. Ramadan and Eid dates are on the Hijri calendar, and Arabic Hama prayer times give the same table. The closest comparison in the country is Homs prayer times, and the widest contrast is Aleppo prayer times further north.