🕌 Medina

Mecca and Medina both fall under the religious authority of Saudi Arabia's General Presidency for the Affairs of the Two Holy Mosques, which publishes a single Umm al-Qura calendar for the entire Kingdom. The method applies uniformly from Tabuk in the north to Najran in the south, so Medina at 24.5°N and Mecca at 21.4°N use identical Fajr and Isha angles — 18.5 degrees for Fajr and Maghrib + 90 minutes for Isha, extended to 120 minutes during Ramadan. Sharing a single method keeps national broadcasts, mosque schedules, and printed calendars consistent across the country, which matters most during Ramadan when iftar timing is announced live from both holy mosques. It also simplifies the experience for pilgrims who travel between the two cities during a single Hajj or Umrah trip, since their prayer-time app uses the same framework on both sides of the journey. The actual minute of each prayer still differs slightly because the two cities sit at different latitudes and longitudes, but the calibration framework is one and the same.

Non-Muslims are not permitted to enter the central haram of Medina, the area immediately surrounding Al-Masjid an-Nabawi where the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ is buried beneath the green dome. Saudi authorities enforce the restriction with bilingual signage on approach roads and checkpoints around the inner city, similar to the arrangement in Mecca though the Medina haram covers a smaller geographic footprint and is more easily bypassed by road. Outlying districts of the wider Madinah Region, including the airport corridor and the date farms north of the city, are accessible to non-Muslim travellers and tourists — but the Prophet's Mosque, the Rawdah inside it, the historic mosques such as Quba and Qiblatayn, and the surrounding shopping streets and hotels are reserved for Muslims. The Madinah Region as a whole has a population of roughly 1.5 million people, swelling significantly during Hajj season and Ramadan when many pilgrims combine a Medina visit with their journey to Mecca. Visiting Medina is considered mustahabb (recommended) for pilgrims but is not a required part of Hajj or Umrah.

Mecca and Medina lie about 450 kilometres apart on the same Asia/Riyadh timezone and use the identical Umm al-Qura calculation, so their schedules track closely throughout the year and use matching Fajr (18.5°) and Isha (Maghrib + 90 min) parameters. The visible differences come from latitude and longitude alone — Medina's 24.5°N location places it three degrees north of Mecca, lengthening its summer days slightly and shortening its winter days by the same margin, while its longitude of 39.6°E pushes solar noon roughly one minute earlier than Mecca at 39.86°E. In practice Fajr, Maghrib, and Isha typically sit two to five minutes apart between the two cities, with the gap widening near the June and December solstices when latitude effects are strongest. Many pilgrims travel between them in a single day during Hajj or Umrah, which is why we publish a separate page for each city rather than a shared schedule, even though the underlying method is the same. The exact city-level minute matters when catching congregation at either holy mosque.

Masjid Quba is the first mosque ever built in Islam, founded by the Prophet ﷺ in the days immediately after the Hijrah when he stopped at the village of Quba on his way into Medina in 622 CE. The Qur'an refers to it in Surah At-Tawbah as the mosque 'founded on righteousness from the first day,' and the Prophet ﷺ visited it weekly from his home near Al-Masjid an-Nabawi. A well-known hadith records that performing two rak'ahs at Quba carries the reward of an Umrah, which is why pilgrims visiting Medina almost always include Quba in their itinerary. The current Saudi-era expansion accommodates tens of thousands of worshippers and lies roughly five kilometres south of the Prophet's Mosque. Like the rest of Medina's haram zone, the mosque is open only to Muslims.

Prayer times differ between cities because they are computed from the local position of the sun, which depends on latitude, longitude, and the day of the year. Latitude is the dominant factor: a city at 24.5°N like Medina sees longer summer days than Mecca at 21.4°N, so its Fajr arrives slightly earlier in June and its Isha later. Longitude shifts the clock-time of solar noon by four minutes per degree, so cities east of one another see Dhuhr earlier even when they share a timezone. Calculation method adds a third layer — Umm al-Qura uses an 18.5° Fajr angle while ISNA uses 15°, which can move Fajr by ten minutes or more at the same coordinates. Daily Adhan applies each country's conventional method to the city's exact coordinates so the published schedule matches local mosques.