Prayer Times in Port Said, Egypt Today

The same coast as Alexandria, nine minutes ahead of it

Port Said sits at the Mediterranean mouth of the Suez Canal, at roughly 31.27 degrees north and 32.30 degrees east. Alexandria lies on the same stretch of coast at almost exactly the same latitude — 31.20 degrees — and yet the two cities' prayer times differ by close to ten minutes on every entry, every day of the year.

The whole of that difference is longitude. Port Said is nearly two and a half degrees east of Alexandria, and the sun covers a degree every four minutes. The pair make an unusually clean demonstration of the principle, because their latitudes are near enough identical that nothing else is in play: same day length, same seasonal behaviour, same coast, sun arriving nine or ten minutes sooner in the east.

Northern and eastern at the same time

Port Said is the only Egyptian city on this site that sits at both extremes at once. Its longitude is among the most easterly on the Nile side of the country, putting it about four minutes ahead of Cairo; its latitude is at the northern edge, which gives it one of the widest annual ranges in Egypt.

The two effects behave quite differently. The longitude offset is fixed — four minutes ahead of the capital in January and four minutes ahead in July. The latitude effect is seasonal and asymmetric, lengthening summer days towards fourteen hours and shortening winter ones to a shade under ten. Anyone comparing this page with a southern one should keep those two mechanisms separate rather than treating the difference as a single number.

What the harbour horizon changes

The sea occupies the northern arc of the sky here, and the canal approach keeps the low horizon relatively free of building on that side. That matches the calculation's assumption of a flat, unobstructed horizon more closely than most inland positions do.

It changes nothing in the figures. Sunrise and sunset in the table are computed for a level horizon at ground elevation regardless of what is actually in front of you, which is the only workable convention. What a sea horizon does offer is a rare chance to see the calculated Maghrib and the observed sunset agree almost exactly, which they do not do in cities backed by high ground.

Twilight at the northern edge of the country

The further north you go, the shallower the sun's descent towards the horizon and the longer it lingers in the twilight band. Port Said therefore has slightly longer gaps between Fajr and sunrise, and between Maghrib and Isha, than Upper Egyptian cities do at the same season — a matter of a few minutes rather than a transformation, but it is consistent and it runs the same way all year.

During Ramadan the practical effect is a marginally longer breathing space between breaking the fast and standing for taraweeh than a relative in Aswan or Luxor would report.

The convention behind these numbers

Fajr uses 19.5 degrees of solar depression and Isha 17.5, the parameters set by the General Authority of Survey and used throughout Egypt. They are applied here to Port Said's coordinates and nothing else about the method is local. The Egypt prayer times hub covers the background. Egypt's seasonal clock change moves the entire table by an hour twice a year.

Where the afternoon prayer is placed in Port Said

Asr is listed at the threshold used by the Shafi'i and Maliki schools: an object's shadow having grown by the object's own height beyond its midday length. The Hanafi threshold is twice that growth and lands significantly later.

Egypt has both Shafi'i and Hanafi communities and you may hear both timings in the same district. It is a matter of school, not of accuracy, and it affects only Asr.

Fasting in a port that does not stop

Canal traffic and port operations run continuously, and shift patterns here often cut across the fasting day rather than fitting around it. That makes the monthly view more practical than a single day's figures: both Fajr and Maghrib move steadily through Ramadan, and a rota planned against the first night's times will be several minutes out by the last.

Sunrise is in the table but is not a boundary of the fast. It marks the end of the window in which Fajr may still be prayed, and Egypt's wide dawn angle makes that window a long one. Some local calendars print an imsak a few minutes ahead of Fajr as a margin; the figure here is the calculated dawn itself.

Jumu'ah around a working port

Friday prayer replaces Dhuhr for those attending and is timed from the Dhuhr entry above. In a city where a large share of the workforce is on shift, congregation sizes swing more by rota than by season. Sermon length and the interval before the iqama are set mosque by mosque; those praying at home use the ordinary Dhuhr time listed.

Setting the direction, and other pages

Rather than estimate the direction of prayer from a street line or a remembered bearing, compute it from your own position with the Qibla direction tool. If you are fixing an orientation permanently inside a steel-framed or reinforced building, have it surveyed instead of trusting a phone compass. Ramadan and Eid dates are on the Hijri calendar, and an Arabic Port Said schedule gives the same table. The comparison cities in the opening paragraph are Alexandria prayer times and, at the far end of the canal, Suez prayer times.