ʿIlm al-Mīqāt · the science of sacred timekeeping

Every mosque once had its own astronomer. Now every believer does.

Prayer times computed from the sky above you — your precise coordinates, your floor of the building, to the second. Not read from a city table. Not rounded to a minute. Restored to what the definition always was.

All 17 authority conventions computed faithfully · verified, never contradicted · reproduces the Umm al-Qura reference to the second
SOLAR ALTITUDE · MAKKAH 21.4225°N 39.8262°E · METHOD UMM AL-QURA · REFERENCE DAY 2026-08-09 EVERY TIME BELOW: COMPUTED BY THIS ENGINE, TO THE SECOND
0° horizon −18.5° · true dawn FAJR 04:35:10 SUNRISE 05:56:54 DHUHR 12:26:14 ASR 15:46:51 MAGHRIB 18:55:18 ISHA 20:25:18
The restoration

This is not a disruption. It is a return.

For a thousand years, every great mosque employed a muwaqqit — the timekeeper-astronomer who determined prayer times for that one place by observation and computation. The science had a name, ʿilm al-mīqāt, and it drove some of the finest astronomy on Earth: Ibn al-Shāṭir, whose planetary models anticipated Copernicus, kept the time of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus.

The last century replaced him with national timetables — one calendar per country, bucketed by city, rounded to the minute. Useful administration. But the religious definition never changed: Fajr is true dawn at your horizon. Maghrib is the sun setting where you stand. When Dubai's scholars ruled that the upper floors of the Burj Khalifa break their fast minutes after the street, that was the tradition itself insisting the definition was always local and physical.

Computing it per person was impossible. At microsecond-class solves, it isn't anymore.

“City timetables were the approximation. The sky above the believer was always the standard. THE POSITION OF THIS ENGINE — ALONGSIDE EVERY AUTHORITY, AGAINST NONE
Accuracy

To the second. To the meter. To the floor.

Full VSOP-class astronomy runs under every solve. These are not claims — each one was produced by this engine, and every figure on this page can be re-run against your own authority's published calendar.

Authority reproduction MEASURED

Umm al-Qura reference, Makkah, 2026-08-09 — reproduced by the production engine:

PrayerReferenceThis engineΔ
Fajr04:35:1004:35:10match
Isha20:25:1820:25:18match

Second-precision agreement, reproducible against the live API. Minute-rounded civil output: identical.

Per meter, per floor THE PERSONAL TIER

Longitude moves prayer times ~2 seconds per kilometer — a 30 km metro spans a full minute edge to edge, decisive for imsak and the validity of a fast. And elevation is a real, measured horizon-dip model (the 1.76′·√h law): in Dubai at 300 m, sunrise shifts −2:35 and maghrib +2:34.

The Burj Khalifa case, solved: per-floor iftar, servable from an API — to our knowledge, the only one in existence that can.

Honest at the poles OSLO · 2026-06-21 · MWL

Where the sun never reaches the twilight angle, we say so — then offer every scholarly mitigation. Others silently invent numbers. Five mitigation rules; six modes counting the honest “does not occur” — all computed:

RuleFajrIsha
none (honest)— does not occur —— does not occur —
angle02:20:4500:11:47
one-seventh03:09:2823:28:14
middle of night01:18:4401:18:58
nearest valid day01:48:2700:53:07
nearest valid latitude02:56:5023:27:32

Which rule applies is jurisdictional — so it stays your choice, never our silent default. Every row above is reproducible on the case it names (Oslo 59.9138° N, 10.7387° E, 2026-06-21, method=MWL, UTC+2).

The complete surface 17 CONVENTIONS

MWL, ISNA, Egypt, Karachi, Umm al-Qura, Makkah, Dubai, Qatar, Gulf, Kuwait, Singapore, France, Turkey, Russia, Tehran, Jafari, and the Moonsighting Committee seasonal method — plus both Asr schools, both midnight conventions, shafaq variants, imsak offset, custom angles, astronomical Hijri with its anchoring new moon exposed, and Qibla bearing + distance — always available (WGS84 geodesic, tagged spherical fallback if the geodesy service is ever down). Every response returns the angles it used. Nothing is a label; everything is a number you can check.

The interface

One endpoint, the whole surface.

Prayer times, Qibla bearing, Hijri date and month-at-a-time schedules — plain HTTPS, JSON out, every response carrying the convention and the angles it used. Full API reference →

The instrument panel

Real numbers, not adjectives.

MEASURED 2026-08-17 · MEDIANS OF 11 RUNS

Two layers, both real: the engine's own solve, and what a client sees end-to-end over HTTP. Medians of 11 runs — we report both layers rather than pick the flattering one.

120 µs
engine solve, median
p99 225 µs
362 µs
served over HTTP, median
p99 1,293 µs
15 ms
an entire year's calendar
over HTTP, 12 month calls
The economics

Why the good product was impossible — until it wasn't.

Prayer traffic arrives in five synchronized, city-wide waves a day — the hardest spike pattern in consumer APIs. Every incumbent survives it the same way: by degrading the product until it caches. Bucket everyone to a city key, round to the minute, and the cache holds. Offer the true product — times for the user's own coordinates — and every response becomes a unique key. The cache dies by construction. That is the asymmetry this engine exists on.

The commodity tier · served from cache

City times, like everyone has

Deterministic per (city, date, method), pre-computable planet-wide overnight and CDN-served. This tier we simply do cheaper and more accurately than anyone.

The personal tier · served by compute

Your street. Your floor. To the second.

Every request unique, every request computed — microseconds each, spike-immune. Incumbents cannot follow without rebuilding their stack: their economics are load-bearing on the bucketing this tier removes.

Caching serves the commodity. Compute serves the person. Only we can afford compute.
Proof

Don't trust us. Check.

A standing benchmark program, rerun monthly, shared in full with licensees and serious evaluators on request. Reproducibility is black-box: the query lists, the live API's responses, the authorities' published times, and the diff script — never a line of the engine. Every number can be checked against your own authority's calendar; no one needs to believe anything.

B1
Authority agreement
Full-year sweeps against Umm al-Qura, Diyanet, Egypt GAS, MUIS, and the Moonsighting Committee — max and mean deviation in seconds, per prayer, per method.
B2
Cross-implementation
The same queries against the common free services and libraries, with every discrepancy explained by the underlying convention or bug — each one its own documentation page.
B3
Edge honesty
The high-latitude gallery: Oslo and Tromsø across the year — five mitigation rules; six modes counting the honest “does not occur”, reported beside the numbers others invent.
B4
Physics
Elevation and horizon dip against the measured law, DST boundaries, polar Hijri continuity.
B5
Performance
Latency percentiles at both layers — the engine's own solve and end-to-end over HTTP — plus full-year calendar cost. The instrument panel above, re-measured monthly.
Licensing

Licensed to those who take it seriously.

No public meters. The engine is licensed under agreements scoped to what you're building — and the number that matters is the per-second burst ceiling, because prayer apps live and die at the adhan spike. Ours is committed contractually; our cost at peak is bounded, so we can promise what metered services can't.

Your entire prayer backend becomes one endpoint. Your engineers build front-end; your budget does marketing. Timezones, DST, high-latitude rules, authority parameter changes, Hijri, Qibla — off your roadmap, permanently. The mathematics never leaves our servers; you license outcomes, not internals.

For one partner, an exclusive commercial partnership is available: two years, worldwide, consumer Islamic apps — the only app on Earth with verified, to-the-second, per-floor prayer times, for two Ramadans.

prayer@kairoico.com

The forms it takes

  • EXCLUSIVE PARTNERSHIP
    Consumer apps, worldwide, 2 years. Advance + guaranteed monthly minimum. One partner only.
  • DEDICATED INSTANCE
    Your own isolated deployment, operated by us: private endpoint, your SLA, your region and data residency.
  • APPLIANCE & OEM · via API
    Adhan clocks, mosque displays and wearables call the hosted engine over the API — you ship the device, the times come from our servers. Nothing to embed, nothing to update in the field.
  • ENTERPRISE & INSTITUTIONS
    Airlines, hospitality, government platforms: contractual SLA, verified computation, per-location terms.
Questions

Asked, answered.

There are free prayer APIs. Why pay?

Free in this market means unfunded: per-IP rate caps, no SLA, no capacity commitment — and the failure lands at the adhan moment, the worst second to break. You're not paying to beat free on price; you're paying for a committed burst ceiling, verified accuracy, and a bounded, predictable cost you can build a business on — plus the personal tier (precise coordinates, floor, seconds) that no cache-based service can serve at all. Our ceilings are published per plan, sustained and burst and concurrent, so you can size a launch before you sign anything.

Do you ever contradict my country's official times?

Never. All 17 authority conventions are computed faithfully and named in every response, and the B1 benchmark exists to prove our agreement with them, rerun monthly. The personal tier is offered alongside the conventions as what they were always approximating — the choice of which to display is yours and your scholars'.

What happens at high latitudes?

Where a twilight angle is never reached we return “does not occur,” plus the five recognized mitigation rules — angle-based, one-seventh, middle-of-night, nearest-valid-day, and nearest-valid-latitude — computed in full. Six modes in all, counting the honest “does not occur”. Which rule applies is a jurisdictional choice, so it stays yours; we will not silently pick a convention for your users.

What do you retain about my users?

Nothing. The engine is stateless compute: a date and a coordinate in, geometry out. No accounts, no profiles, no stored locations — the smallest possible privacy surface for a devotional category that has been burned by location-data scandals before.

Can I verify your numbers before talking to you?

Yes — that's the point. Every figure on this page names its date, its place and its method, so you can check it against your own authority's published calendar before you write to us. The benchmark tables, the query lists, and the diff script are yours on request, and we will happily run your own dates and places for you. Come to the licensing conversation having already checked us.