Prayer Times in Zagazig, Egypt Today

One minute from the capital, and what a minute is actually worth

Zagazig lies at about 30.59 degrees north and 31.50 degrees east, in the eastern Delta. That longitude is roughly a quarter of a degree east of Cairo's, which converts to about one minute of real time. Every prayer here enters approximately a minute before the capital's.

It is worth pausing on whether a minute justifies a separate page, because the honest answer sets expectations for the whole site. A minute is below the noise floor of ordinary practice. Two mosques on the same street routinely differ by five or ten minutes in when they call the iqama; a wristwatch and a phone can disagree by more than a minute. Nobody in this city needs to switch away from the Cairo table on account of the astronomy alone.

Where the difference stops being noise

Move east and it changes quickly. From Zagazig, Ismailia is about three minutes ahead, Suez a little over four, Hurghada nine, and Sharm El Sheikh eleven. Alexandria, in the other direction, is six minutes behind. Those are all differences you would notice at the boundaries of a fasting day.

The useful threshold is somewhere around three to five minutes. Below it, choose whichever page is convenient. Above it, choose the right one. Zagazig sits comfortably below that threshold relative to Cairo and comfortably above it relative to the Red Sea, which is exactly why the country needs city pages rather than a single national table.

The latitude half of the picture

Longitude shifts the whole table by a fixed amount; latitude changes its shape across the year. At just under thirty-one degrees north Zagazig has one of the wider annual ranges in Egypt, with day length running from close to fourteen hours at midsummer to a little over ten at midwinter.

That is roughly four hours of movement, most of it concentrated in the evening prayers. Dhuhr shifts hardly at all between January and July. Maghrib and Isha shift enormously, which is why an evening arrangement fixed in one season rarely survives into the next.

The angles Egypt uses

The dawn figure is 19.5 degrees of solar depression and the nightfall figure 17.5, both from the General Authority of Survey. They are applied to Zagazig's coordinates without local adjustment. The Egypt prayer times hub explains the convention and its history. Egypt also keeps a seasonal clock change again, which moves the whole table by an hour on two weekends a year.

The threshold used for the afternoon prayer

Asr is entered here on the Shafi'i and Maliki reckoning: once an upright object's shadow has grown by an amount equal to the object's own height, beyond whatever shadow stood at midday. The Hanafi threshold requires double that growth and arrives roughly forty minutes to an hour later.

Both schools are present in Egypt. If your usual mosque calls Asr noticeably later than this page lists, the explanation is almost certainly the school it follows rather than an error in the arithmetic, and the remaining four prayers will match.

Sunrise is in the table and is not a prayer

What sunrise marks is the end of the period in which Fajr may still be performed. It is not a boundary of the fast and it should never be treated as the end of the pre-dawn meal. Egypt's dawn angle is wide, so the interval between Fajr and sunrise is long, and the error would be a large one rather than a marginal few minutes.

Many Delta calendars print an imsak a short way before Fajr as a deliberate precaution. This page publishes the calculated dawn, which is the outer edge of the permitted window rather than the cautious version of it.

Fasting on an agricultural timetable

Sharqia is one of the country's major farming governorates, and outside the city the working day still begins before dawn and pauses through the hottest hours. During Ramadan that pattern places most of the labour between Fajr and the early afternoon, with the evening given over to iftar and what follows it.

The monthly table is the more useful view for planning that, because both ends of the fast move steadily across the month. So does the gap between Maghrib and Isha, which depends on how quickly the sun clears the twilight band and therefore widens and narrows with the season rather than staying fixed.

Friday in a university city

Jumu'ah replaces Dhuhr for those who attend and is timed from the Dhuhr entry above. Zagazig's student population shifts the pattern of Friday attendance considerably between term and vacation, and the larger central mosques allow longer between the call and the standing than small neighbourhood ones because their congregations come from further away. Anyone praying at home keeps the ordinary Dhuhr time.

Finding the direction, and where to go next

Compute the direction of prayer from your own position with the Qibla direction tool rather than estimating it from the alignment of a room or a remembered bearing from elsewhere. The Hijri calendar carries Ramadan and Eid dates, and an Arabic Zagazig schedule gives the same table. The nearest page that genuinely differs from this one is Ismailia prayer times, three minutes east; Cairo prayer times are within a minute and effectively interchangeable.