Prayer Times in Sohag, Egypt Today

Even Dhuhr moves, by about half an hour across the year

Sohag lies on the Nile in Upper Egypt at roughly 26.56 degrees north and 31.69 degrees east. Most explanations of prayer times treat Dhuhr as the fixed point around which the others swing. That is a useful simplification and it is not quite true, and Sohag is as good a place as any to say so.

Dhuhr is set by the sun crossing the meridian, and the sun does not cross the meridian at the same clock reading every day. The earth's orbit is not circular and its axis is tilted, and the two effects combine into what astronomers call the equation of time. Over the course of a year it runs roughly a quarter of an hour ahead of the mean in early November and about a quarter of an hour behind it in February. The clock time of solar noon — and therefore of Dhuhr — travels by around half an hour between those two extremes, at Sohag and everywhere else.

What that means when you compare pages

The equation of time applies identically at every location, so it cancels out when you compare one city with another. That is why the offsets quoted across this site are stable: Sohag is about two minutes ahead of Cairo on every date, because the two cities share the same equation of time and differ only by longitude.

Sohag lies a little under half a degree east of the capital. At four minutes to the degree, that is the whole of the fixed difference. Against Luxor, further east and south, this page runs about four minutes behind; against Alexandria it runs about seven ahead.

Latitude, and the size of the annual swing

Where Sohag does differ structurally from the Delta is in how far the year moves the table. Day length here runs from a little under thirteen and three quarter hours at midsummer to roughly ten and a third at midwinter — about three and a third hours of annual range.

The Delta coast swings by four hours and Aswan by three, so Upper Egypt sits between them and closer to the southern end. The consequence for anyone who has moved north or south within Egypt is that the summer fast changes length noticeably even though the fixed offset barely changes at all.

The angles Egypt applies

Fajr is calculated at 19.5 degrees of solar depression and Isha at 17.5 — the General Authority of Survey convention, used throughout the country and applied here to Sohag's coordinates. The Egypt prayer times hub covers its origin and its reach beyond Egypt's borders. The seasonal clock change adds an hour to the whole table for part of the year.

How the afternoon prayer is fixed

Asr is entered at the Shafi'i and Maliki threshold: the moment an upright object's shadow has grown by an amount equal to the object's own height, measured beyond the shadow it cast at solar noon. The Hanafi position requires that growth to double and reaches Asr something like forty minutes to an hour later.

Note that this definition is anchored to the midday shadow, which is why the equation of time matters here too. Asr moves with Dhuhr rather than independently of it, and the two keep a relationship that depends on the season rather than on the clock.

Sunrise, and the error it invites during Ramadan

Sunrise is listed but is neither a prayer nor a boundary of the fast. It marks the point after which Fajr can no longer be performed. Under a 19.5-degree dawn angle the interval between Fajr and sunrise is long, so anyone who treats sunrise as the end of the pre-dawn meal is not making a marginal mistake.

Calendars printed in the governorate often carry an imsak a few minutes ahead of Fajr as a deliberate margin of caution. What appears on this page is the calculated dawn, which is the boundary itself rather than the cautious version of it.

Fasting along this stretch of the river

Sohag governorate is agricultural along a narrow strip either side of the Nile, and the working rhythm during Ramadan follows the heat rather than the office day: labour before the sun is high, rest through the afternoon, activity again after Maghrib.

Both boundaries of the fast drift steadily through the month, which is why the monthly view is more useful than a single day's figures. So does the interval between Maghrib and Isha, because Isha is set by how far the sun has sunk rather than by a fixed count of minutes after sunset — the gap between iftar and taraweeh is not the same quantity every night.

Friday in the governorate's towns

Jumu'ah replaces Dhuhr for those who attend and takes its timing from the Dhuhr entry above. Outside the city, village congregations often draw from a wider catchment than an urban mosque, so the walk is usually what determines when people arrive rather than the call itself. Sermon length and the interval before the iqama are decided locally; those praying at home keep the ordinary Dhuhr time.

Orientation, the Arabic table and nearby pages

Compute the direction of prayer from your own position with the Qibla direction tool rather than carrying over a bearing from another city. Ramadan and Eid dates are on the Hijri calendar, and an Arabic Sohag schedule carries the same table. The neighbouring river pages are Assiut prayer times downstream and Luxor prayer times upstream.