Namaz Times in Kano, Nigeria Today

The widest annual range in Nigeria is still under ninety minutes

Kano lies at about 12.00 degrees north and 8.59 degrees east, the highest latitude of any Nigerian city on this site. Latitude is what decides how far a prayer table travels between summer and winter, so if anywhere in the country has a seasonal story to tell, it is here.

It does not amount to much, and the honest figure is more useful than a dramatic one. Day length in Kano runs from roughly twelve hours and forty minutes at the June solstice to about eleven hours and twenty at the December solstice. That is an annual range of around an hour and a half — the largest in Nigeria, and still less than a quarter of what a city in northern Europe experiences. Port Harcourt, at the southern end of the country, swings by barely half an hour.

Twenty minutes of sun ahead of Lagos

The east-west difference is far larger than the seasonal one, and this is the fact worth carrying away. Kano sits about five and a fifth degrees of longitude east of Lagos. At four minutes to the degree, every salah here enters roughly twenty-one minutes earlier on the clock than it does in Lagos, on every day of the year without exception.

Nigeria keeps a single time zone from the Gulf of Guinea to Lake Chad, so none of that offset is timekeeping — it is the sun arriving earlier. Against Maiduguri, further east again, this page runs about eighteen minutes behind. Against Zaria and Kaduna, both close by on the map, the difference is only three or four minutes.

Maliki reckoning and the orders

Islamic practice in northern Nigeria is overwhelmingly Maliki, and the Qadiriyya and Tijaniyya have deep and long-standing followings in this city. Their gatherings and litanies keep their own calendars and their own rhythm.

None of that changes the five daily times. The orders sit alongside the obligatory salah rather than displacing or rescheduling it, and the Maliki position on the one prayer where schools genuinely differ is the position this table uses. What does vary locally is congregation practice — how long a given mosque leaves between the adhan and the iqama — and that is set mosque by mosque rather than nationally.

Where Asr enters

Asr is placed at the moment an upright object's shadow has lengthened by the object's own height beyond whatever shadow stood at midday. Maliki, Shafi'i and Hanbali scholarship agree on that threshold, and it is what mosques in Kano work to.

The Hanafi school waits for that growth to double, which puts Asr somewhere between forty minutes and an hour later. If an application on your phone shows a noticeably later Asr than the mosque you can hear, check whether it has been left on a Hanafi setting. The other four prayers are identical under both readings.

The angles underneath the table

The figures here use the Muslim World League convention: eighteen degrees of solar depression for Fajr and eighteen again for Isha, applied to Kano's coordinates on a fixed UTC+1 clock with no seasonal change. The Nigeria prayer times hub covers the method in more detail.

Because the two angles match and because the sun rises and sets at a steep angle at this latitude, the interval between Maghrib and Isha stays close to an hour and a quarter throughout the year. It does not stretch out in one season and collapse in another the way it does further north in Africa.

Harmattan, and why the calculation is the better guide

Through the dry months the harmattan carries enough dust off the Sahara to blur the horizon badly. On those days the sun can vanish into the haze well before it sets, and the low sky is a poor guide to anything.

The table is unaffected, and that is the point of publishing one. Prayer times everywhere are computed for a clear, level horizon, and mosques in Kano keep those computed times regardless of what the sky looks like. During harmattan the gap between what you can see and what the table reports is at its widest, and the table is what the congregation is following.

Ramadan and the fasting day here

Fajr closes the pre-dawn meal and Maghrib opens iftar. Sunrise is listed but marks neither boundary; its role is to close the window in which Fajr may still be prayed.

Because Kano's year moves so little, the fasting day here changes length far less across a Ramadan than it would at higher latitudes — the times drift by a few minutes over the month rather than transforming. What does need care is the source. A timetable shared from Lagos will show iftar around twenty minutes late for this city, and one from Maiduguri around eighteen minutes early.

Jumu'ah, direction and neighbouring cities

The Great Mosque of Kano stands beside the emir's palace in the old city and remains a principal site of Friday congregation, though the city's mosque network is dense enough that most residents attend locally. Jumu'ah replaces Dhuhr for those attending and is timed from the Dhuhr entry above; those praying at home keep the ordinary time.

The direction of prayer from Nigeria is roughly eastward, but fix it properly for where you stand using the Qibla direction tool rather than relying on that generality. Ramadan and Eid dates are on the Hijri calendar, and the closest tables to this one are Zaria prayer times and Kaduna prayer times.