Prayer Times in Mansoura, Egypt Today

In the Delta, latitude is the whole story

Mansoura sits on the Damietta branch of the Nile at about 31.04 degrees north and 31.38 degrees east. Its longitude is barely a seventh of a degree east of Cairo's, which works out at well under a minute of real difference — the sun arrives here something like half a minute before it reaches the capital, which is not a figure anyone should organise a day around.

The latitude is where the difference lies. Mansoura is a full degree north of Cairo, and in the Nile Delta that is the variable that actually moves a timetable. It does not shift the times uniformly the way longitude does; it stretches the summer and compresses the winter, so the difference from the capital changes sign and size depending on the month.

What a degree of latitude buys across the year

At 31 degrees north the longest days of the year run to roughly fourteen hours from sunrise to sunset and the shortest to a few minutes under ten. That is around four hours of annual range, and it is slightly wider than Cairo's, which in turn is considerably wider than Aswan's three hours in the far south.

In practical terms: in June, Isha here holds off a little longer than it does in the capital, and in December the whole afternoon is fractionally shorter. Neither difference is dramatic on any single day. Over a season it is the reason a Delta household and an Upper Egypt household do not experience the same Ramadan even though they read the same national calendar.

A river town and a flat horizon

The Delta is exceptionally level, and Mansoura has no high ground in any direction. That is unusual enough to be worth stating, because prayer time calculation assumes precisely this: a flat, unobstructed horizon at ground level. In hilly places the assumption is a convenient fiction that everyone agrees to work with. Here it is very nearly literal.

The one thing that does interpose is built form. In a dense central street the sun will be gone from view before the listed Maghrib, and from a high floor it will still be visible after. Neither observation overrides the table, and the mosques are working to the table.

Egypt's angles, taken as given

The Fajr and Isha figures here come from the General Authority of Survey's convention of 19.5 and 17.5 degrees, applied to Mansoura's coordinates. That asymmetry — a wider angle at dawn than at nightfall — is what gives Egyptian tables their characteristic early Fajr and comparatively prompt Isha. The Egypt prayer times hub covers the convention's history and reach. Egypt also keeps summer time again, which moves the whole table by an hour twice a year.

Asr in a Shafi'i and Hanafi city

Egyptian legal practice is mixed between the Shafi'i and Hanafi schools, and Asr is the one prayer where that mixture is visible in the clock. This page uses the Shafi'i threshold: Asr enters when an object's shadow has grown by the object's own height beyond its midday minimum. The Hanafi threshold requires twice that growth and falls perhaps forty minutes to an hour later.

You may well hear both in Mansoura on the same afternoon. That is a difference of school, settled long before any of us, not a fault in anybody's arithmetic.

Sunrise, and the mistake it invites

Sunrise is listed but it is not a prayer and it is not a boundary of the fast. What it marks is the close of the period in which Fajr may still be performed. Because Egypt's dawn angle is a wide 19.5 degrees, the stretch between Fajr and sunrise is long — long enough that anyone who treats sunrise as the end of the pre-dawn meal during Ramadan would be eating well past the point at which the fast has begun.

Local Ramadan calendars often print an imsak several minutes ahead of Fajr as a deliberate margin of caution. This page prints the astronomical Fajr, which is the outer limit rather than the recommended one.

Fasting on a university calendar

Mansoura is a university city, and during Ramadan a large student population organises its day around Fajr and Maghrib rather than around the working timetable most of the country follows. The monthly table is more useful than a single day's figures here, because the times move steadily through the month and a schedule fixed on the first night will be several minutes wrong by the last.

The interval between Maghrib and Isha also changes across the month, since Isha is set by a twilight angle rather than by a fixed number of minutes after sunset. The gap between breaking the fast and standing for taraweeh is not the same quantity every night.

The gathering on Friday

For those who attend, Jumu'ah replaces Dhuhr and is timed from the Dhuhr entry above. The length of the address and the delay before the iqama are decided by each mosque. Anyone praying at home keeps the ordinary Dhuhr time shown.

Direction of prayer, and nearby tables

Establish which way to face with the Qibla direction tool, which computes the bearing from your own position — more reliable than reusing a direction remembered from another city. Ramadan and Eid dates are on the Hijri calendar, and an Arabic Mansoura schedule gives the same figures. Downriver at the coast, Damietta prayer times run a shade earlier still; Tanta prayer times cover the central Delta to the west.