Namaz Times in Ibadan, Nigeria Today

Over a hundred kilometres from Lagos, and two minutes from it

Ibadan lies at roughly 7.38 degrees north and 3.95 degrees east. The road down to Lagos runs well over a hundred kilometres, but it runs almost due south, and prayer times do not care about southward travel. What they respond to is longitude, and Ibadan is barely half a degree east of Lagos.

Half a degree is a little over two minutes. Every salah on this page enters about two minutes before the equivalent one in Lagos, all year, and that is the entire astronomical difference between the two cities. Anyone travelling between them can use either table without practical consequence, because two minutes sits well inside the range over which neighbouring mosques already differ in calling the iqama.

Where differences start to be worth acting on

Travel east rather than south and the picture changes fast. Ilorin is about two and a half minutes ahead of Ibadan, Benin City around six and a half, Abuja and Enugu about fourteen, Kano nearly nineteen, and Maiduguri close to thirty-seven.

The threshold at which switching pages becomes worthwhile is somewhere around four or five minutes. Below it, convenience wins. Above it, the difference will show at both boundaries of a fasting day. Nigeria's single time zone stretches across nearly ten degrees of longitude, so the country contains differences on both sides of that threshold — which is precisely why individual city tables exist rather than one national one.

The parameters this table applies in Ibadan

Nigerian pages here use the Muslim World League convention: eighteen degrees of solar depression for Fajr and the same eighteen for Isha, on a fixed UTC+1 clock. Nigeria does not observe any seasonal time change, so nothing in the table jumps by an hour at any point in the year. The Nigeria prayer times hub sets out the method.

A large Muslim community in a region often described otherwise

The south-west is usually characterised as Christian-majority, and across the region as a whole that is broadly the picture. It undersells what is on the ground in Ibadan and across Oyo State, where the Muslim population is very large, thoroughly established and Yoruba-speaking rather than recently arrived from the north.

What follows from that is organisational rather than astronomical. Mosque provision in this city is dense in the older quarters and thinner in the newer suburbs and along the university corridor; Friday congregations are substantial; and the practical question for most residents is which jumu'ah mosque is reachable rather than whether the times differ. They do not — the calculation is the same one used in Kano, applied to different coordinates.

Measuring the shadow for Asr

Asr is listed at the threshold agreed by the Maliki, Shafi'i and Hanbali schools: the point at which an upright object's shadow has grown by the object's own height beyond the shadow it cast at midday. Nigerian practice is predominantly Maliki, so this is the reckoning in general use.

The Hanafi threshold doubles that requirement and arrives roughly forty minutes to an hour later. If your phone shows an Asr well after the mosque calls it, that setting is the usual explanation. Nothing else in the table is affected by the difference.

How little the year moves this page

At just over seven degrees north, Ibadan is close to the equator and its table is correspondingly steady. Day length runs from about twelve hours and twenty-five minutes at the June solstice to about eleven and a half at the December one — under an hour of range across the entire year.

That stability is worth saying plainly rather than dressing up. Fajr and Isha move by a handful of minutes and move back. Because the two twilight angles are equal and the sun sets almost vertically at this latitude, the interval between Maghrib and Isha stays close to an hour and a quarter in every month. A monthly table printed here remains broadly serviceable for a good deal longer than it would at higher latitudes.

Ramadan and the timetable somebody sends you

Fajr ends the pre-dawn meal and Maghrib opens iftar; sunrise is in the table but marks neither, closing instead the window in which Fajr may still be prayed.

Because Ibadan's own times barely drift across a month, the risk during Ramadan is not seasonal — it is the shared timetable. A calendar forwarded from Kano will show iftar nineteen minutes early for this city, and one from Maiduguri more than half an hour early. Either would mean breaking the fast before Maghrib has entered. Take the times from a page computed for these coordinates.

Jumu'ah, the Qibla and adjacent cities

Friday prayer replaces Dhuhr for those attending and takes its timing from the Dhuhr entry above; sermon length and the delay before the iqama are decided by each mosque, and anyone praying at home keeps the ordinary time. The direction of prayer from Nigeria is roughly eastward, but work out the actual bearing for your own position with the Qibla direction tool rather than settling for that. Ramadan and Eid dates sit on the Hijri calendar. The neighbouring tables are Lagos prayer times to the south and Ilorin prayer times to the north-east.