salat

One of the pillars of Islam is salat, which is the act of praying five times a day. Each prayer has a specific time interval, defined in terms of the Sun's position so anyone anywhere in the world can know when it is time to pray.

However with modern computation most Muslims use calculated prayer times to determine when to pray instead of watching the Sun. This package performs accurate calculations using orbital dynamics equations instead of common approximations, and native Python tools like datetime to calculate these times.

Prayer Times

In general terms, the time range of a prayer is from it's start until the start of the next prayer, except for Fajr which ends at sunrise and Isha which is recommended to end before midnight. The start of the prayer time intervals are the following:

However there are various methods and standards for what exact times these general terms correspond to. For example, according to the Muslim World League, Fajr starts when the altitude of the Sun is 18 degrees below the horizon, while the Islamic Society of North America determined it's when the sun is 15 degrees below the horizon.

Motivation

There are many websites with prayer time tables and apps that show automatically updating prayer times for your location for each day. However there are not many Python ones, and they either query the websites for time tables or use approximate methods.

This package has the following goals:

1. Accurate calculations using exact equations and high precision parameters where possible
2. Use developer friendly interface including datetimes and typehints
3. Support several calculation methods

Supported methods

This package supports the following calculation methods:

1. ISNA (Islamic Society of North America)
2. MWL (Muslim World League)
3. Egypt (Egyptian General Authority of Survey)
4. Tehran (Institute of Geophysics, University of Tehran)
5. Jafari (Shia Ithna Ashari, Leva Research Institute, Qum)

There are many more methods in use around the world, so if there's any missing that you would like to see please submit an issue.

Installation

pip install salat

Example code

import salat
import datetime as dt

pt = salat.PrayerTimes(salat.CalculationMethod.ISNA, salat.AsrMethod.STANDARD)
# January 1, 2000
date = dt.date(2000, 1, 1)
# address of NYC
longitude = -74.0060 # degrees East
latitude = 40.7128 # degrees North
# EST timezone (UTC offset of -5 hours)
eastern = dt.timezone(dt.timedelta(hours=-5), "EST")
# calculate times
prayer_times = pt.calc_times(date, eastern, longitude, latitude)

for name, time in prayer_times.items():
    print(name, time)

Output

fajr 2000-01-01 05:58:15.232445-05:00
sunrise 2000-01-01 07:20:09.308763-05:00
dhuhr 2000-01-01 11:59:25.683315-05:00
asr 2000-01-01 14:20:54.967648-05:00
maghrib 2000-01-01 16:38:42.057867-05:00
isha 2000-01-01 18:00:36.134185-05:00
midnight 2000-01-01 23:59:29.074091-05:00

Planned features

1. Adjustment for higher altitudes
2. Options for Isha/Fajr calculation in high altitudes based on "middle of the night" and "sevent of the night" methods
3. Add additional calculation methods like Makkah method by Umm al-Qura University, Makkah