Introducing Ummah Salah

Ummah Salah is a prayer times website. When you open it, it finds your location and shows today’s five prayer times, along with how long it is until the next one. That’s the main thing it does, and I’ve tried to keep it that way. The times sit at the very top of the page so you can check them and get on with your day.

I made it because I wanted a prayer times page that opened quickly, didn’t ask me to sign up for anything, and was clear about how its times were worked out. I hope it’s useful to others too.

What’s on the page

Below the times is a drawing of the sun’s path through the whole day, with the horizon running across it and each prayer marked where it falls. It helped me picture something I hadn’t really thought about before: Fajr and Isha both happen while the sun is below the horizon, and that’s why they are the two times that differ most from one timetable to another.

There’s also a Qibla direction, given in degrees from north, and a settings menu that stays out of the way until you need it. Each setting has a small info button with a plain explanation, because a bare number of degrees doesn’t mean much to most people. It didn’t mean much to me when I started.

Why prayer times differ

Different timetables often disagree by a few minutes, and sometimes by more. That usually isn’t a mistake on anyone’s part. It comes down to which calculation method is used for Fajr and Isha, which school is followed for Asr, and the small safety margins some mosques add. The site picks a sensible default based on your country, shows the name of the method it’s using, and lets you change any of it.

If your mosque’s timetable is different, there’s an optional Match your mosque feature. You enter a couple of times from their timetable and the site works backwards to find the settings that would give those times. You never have to use it, and the default times stand on their own.

In London, most mosques follow the London Unified Prayer Timetable, published by East London Mosque. It isn’t produced by a single formula, so rather than approximating it, the site uses the published table as it is. I wrote more about that, and about what happens to Fajr and Isha during a British summer, in Twilight, latitude and the London prayer timetable.

How it works

There’s no server doing the calculations. The site is a small set of static files, and everything is worked out in your browser. The astronomy is handled by Adhan, a well-tested open-source library, and I’m grateful to the people who wrote it. My part was mostly the page around it: the layout, the sun path drawing, the explanations and the settings.

Because it all happens on your device, your location is only used there to calculate the times and isn’t sent anywhere. Your settings are saved in your own browser, so they’re still there next time. There are no accounts, no tracking and no adverts, and the whole page is only a few tens of kilobytes, so it loads quickly even on a weak signal. For anyone who’d like the detail, the site has its own page on how the times are worked out.

The hardest part wasn’t the code. It was understanding the different methods well enough to explain them fairly, without suggesting that one is right and another is wrong. Those are questions for scholars, not for a website.

Ummah Salah is free at ummahsalah.com. I hope it’s of some benefit. May Allah accept our good deeds.