Prayer Times in Tanta, Egypt Today

Midway on the road, but not midway in the timetable

Tanta stands at about 30.79 degrees north and 31.00 degrees east, in the middle of the Delta on the line between Cairo and Alexandria. People assume its prayer times sit halfway between the two. They do not, and the reason is worth understanding because it applies across the whole country.

Prayer times are governed by longitude, not by road distance. Tanta is only about a quarter of a degree west of Cairo, so it runs roughly one minute behind the capital. Alexandria is a full degree further west again, so Tanta runs about four minutes ahead of it. The city sits near the midpoint of the highway and nowhere near the midpoint of the clock, because the Delta's road bends west far more sharply than the meridians do.

Four minutes is worth knowing; one minute is not

The practical consequence is asymmetric. Anyone travelling between Tanta and Cairo can use either page without consequence: a minute is inside the range of variation between two mosques on the same street. Anyone travelling to or from Alexandria should switch pages, because four or five minutes is enough to matter at the edges of the fasting day.

This is the general rule for Egypt. Distance along the Nile counts for very little, because the river runs broadly north–south; distance east or west counts for a great deal. Hurghada and Sharm El Sheikh, both far to the east, are ten to twelve minutes ahead of Cairo despite lying south of it.

Al-Badawi's mosque and the shape of the religious week

The mosque of Sayyid Ahmad al-Badawi stands at the centre of the city and has been a focus of Sufi devotion in the Delta for centuries. Its presence shapes how and where people gather here in a way no timetable can capture.

It changes nothing about the five obligatory times. Devotional gatherings run on their own rhythm and sit alongside the daily prayers rather than displacing them. What the mosque does affect, in a purely practical sense, is congregation size and the interval a large central mosque allows between the call and the standing — typically longer than a small neighbourhood mosque, because more people are arriving from further away.

The two numbers underneath every Egyptian table

Fajr is calculated at 19.5 degrees of solar depression and Isha at 17.5, the parameters of the General Authority of Survey. Applied to Tanta's coordinates, that is the whole of the arithmetic. Background on the convention is on the Egypt prayer times hub. The national clock now includes a summer change, so the entire table shifts by an hour on two weekends of the year.

How far the year moves things here

At nearly thirty-one degrees north, Tanta's day length runs from about fourteen hours at midsummer to a shade over ten at midwinter — close to four hours of annual travel, near the wide end of the Egyptian range. Fajr and Isha extend further still at both ends, since both depend on twilight rather than the sun's disc.

The seasonal effect is not evenly spread across the five prayers. Dhuhr barely moves at all through the year; Maghrib and Isha move a great deal. If you have arranged something around the evening prayers, expect that arrangement to need revisiting every couple of months.

Which afternoon threshold is printed

Asr appears here at the Shafi'i and Maliki threshold: the moment an upright object's shadow has extended by an amount equal to the object's height, on top of the shadow it already cast at midday. The Hanafi school waits for a doubled shadow, which lands somewhere in the region of forty minutes to an hour later depending on the season.

Egypt has substantial Shafi'i and Hanafi populations, so both are heard. If the listed Asr seems early relative to what you are used to, this is almost certainly why, and none of the other four prayers are affected.

Sahur, and why sunrise is the wrong marker

During Ramadan the pre-dawn meal ends at Fajr and the fast breaks at Maghrib. Sunrise is listed but marks neither; its role is to close the window in which Fajr may still be prayed. With a dawn angle as wide as 19.5 degrees, that window is long, and confusing sunrise with the end of sahur would put a fasting person well over an hour out.

Delta calendars frequently print an imsak a few minutes before Fajr as a deliberate cushion. The figure on this page is the calculated dawn, which is the boundary itself rather than the cautious version of it.

Jumu'ah in an agricultural governorate

Friday prayer replaces Dhuhr for those attending and takes its timing from the Dhuhr entry above. Gharbia is heavily agricultural outside the city, and in the surrounding villages the Friday gathering often draws from a wider area than an urban mosque would, so allow more time than the walk alone suggests. Sermon length is the imam's decision. Those praying at home use the ordinary Dhuhr time.

Where to point, and where to read next

Use the Qibla direction tool to fix the direction of prayer from your own coordinates rather than relying on a remembered bearing or a room's alignment. Ramadan and Eid dates are listed on the Hijri calendar, and an Arabic Tanta schedule carries the same figures. The two cities this page is measured against are Cairo prayer times and Alexandria prayer times.