🇩🇿 Algiers

Algiers uses the Egyptian General Authority of Survey method (method 5 in our calculator), a 19.5-degree Fajr and 17.5-degree Isha convention adopted as the standard reference across the Maghreb and used by Djamaa el-Djazaïr and the historic Ketchaoua and El Djedid mosques in the Casbah. Algeria's Ministry of Religious Affairs and Endowments publishes the official timetable using this method, and printed Islamic calendars distributed through major mosques follow the same calibration. The 19.5-degree Fajr angle places dawn slightly earlier than the Muslim World League standard, a difference that runs to five to ten minutes at Algiers's 36.8°N latitude. Apps configured to MWL or Karachi will show Fajr and Isha drift from the local mosque boards, while Dhuhr, Asr and Maghrib match across all conventions because they depend on the sun's altitude rather than a twilight angle.

Prayer times in Algiers shift most between the long summer days of June and July and the short winter days of December and January, with the swing driven by the city's 36.8°N Mediterranean latitude. In late June, Fajr is calculated for around 03:35 and Isha after 21:30, stretching the daylight fast in Ramadan to roughly seventeen hours when the month falls in summer — a noticeable burden on workers and students. By late December, sunrise slips toward 08:00, Maghrib arrives around 17:30, and the gap between Fajr and Maghrib compresses to roughly ten hours. The equinoxes in March and September are the most stable periods, when daily times drift only a minute or two from one day to the next, and the city's coastal Mediterranean climate provides consistent visibility for the visible Fajr and Maghrib. Most Algiers mosques print monthly timetables to capture the gradual shift smoothly across the year.

Algeria is a Muslim-majority country, with the great majority of its forty-five-million population identifying as Sunni Muslim following the Maliki school of jurisprudence — the dominant legal school across North Africa since the medieval period. Islam is the state religion under the Algerian constitution, and the Ministry of Religious Affairs and Endowments oversees mosque administration, imam appointments and printed prayer timetables across the country. The country has a small Ibadi community in the Mzab valley around Ghardaïa, a distinctive minority with its own legal tradition, plus very small Christian and Jewish minorities concentrated in the larger cities. The capital's Casbah, listed by UNESCO since 1992, hosts a continuous tradition of mosque endowment and Sufi gatherings going back to the Ottoman period and earlier. Modern Algerian Islamic life balances state-administered mosques like Djamaa el-Djazaïr with older neighbourhood masjids and zawiyas tied to historic Sufi orders, particularly the Tijaniyya and Qadiriyya.

Djamaa el-Djazaïr on the Bay of Algiers, completed in 2019 with a 264-metre minaret — one of the tallest in the world — and a main hall capacity of 120,000 worshippers, is the principal Friday gathering point in the Algerian capital. The mosque is among the three largest on the planet by floor area and dwarfs the older Ketchaoua Mosque in the Casbah, a building that was seized as a cathedral during the colonial period and returned to Muslim use in 1962. The Great Mosque of Algiers (Djamaa el-Kebir), founded in the eleventh century, hosts the oldest continuous congregation in the city. El Djedid Mosque on Place des Martyrs handles a major weekly gathering in the central business district. Khutbas are typically delivered in Arabic with no translation; Friday prayer usually begins between 12:30 and 13:30.

Prayer times differ between cities because they are calculated from the apparent position of the sun, which depends on a city's latitude, longitude and the date. Algiers sits at 36.8°N, 3.06°E in the Africa/Algiers time zone, on the Mediterranean coast, so its sunrise, solar noon and sunset all happen at different clock times than in cities further north or south, and its summer daylight runs noticeably longer than at lower-latitude Maghreb cities. Two cities at very different latitudes — say London at 51°N and Algiers at 36.8°N — see twilight unfold over different durations, so Fajr, Maghrib and Isha can sit several hours apart even on the same calendar date, with London needing high-latitude adjustment in summer that Algiers does not. Even cities at similar latitudes diverge if they fall in different time zones or follow different calculation conventions for the Fajr and Isha twilight angles.