SalahNowNorway prayer times
Norway has a national prayer-time standard of its own — Felles bønnetid, agreed through Islamsk Råd Norge. This page explains what it is, which timetable each city page shows, and when the times match the national standard.
Scope of this claim
Norway is the one Nordic country whose national reference is not the Diyanet table. Denmark and Sweden adopted the Diyanet table as their national reference; Norway did not. Islamsk Råd Norge publishes Felles bønnetid, a distinct national standard, and it differs from the Diyanet table by several minutes at some prayers and by around twenty minutes at fajr on some days. That is why rows from the Diyanet table carry no institution’s name and no 0-minute claim on these pages, and why only rows taken from Felles bønnetid are named after Islamsk Råd Norge.
Cities
Cities are listed by population. A city that is missing has no entry in the prayer-times database yet.
Calculation and source
- Institution
- Islamic Council Norway
- Method
- Diyanet angles
- Fajr 18° / Isha 17°. This is a calculation, not the Norwegian national standard.
- Asr
- The standard shadow ratio of one is the default for Norway. The IRN table itself prints two asr columns and treats the shadow-one column as primary, which is why the app follows it; a 365-day comparison put the shadow-one column within a minute of the national table and the shadow-two column about fifty minutes away.
- Precaution minutes
- None. The app adds no precaution minutes of its own.
- Time zone
- Norway follows the European daylight saving schedule. Because the country stretches from about 58 to 71 degrees north, the same clock covers wildly different days: on 21 June the sun sets in Kristiansand but never sets in Tromsø, and in December Tromsø has no sunrise at all for several weeks.
- Hijri calendar and crescent
- Ramadan and the two Eids are announced through the council and by individual mosques, and Norwegian communities do not always begin on the same day. The Hijri date shown in the app is calculated and may differ from your mosque’s announcement.
The umbrella council whose Felles bønnetid is the agreed national prayer-time standard in Norway, followed by most Norwegian mosques.
Institutional timetable
Norway prayer times
Norway is not Denmark or Sweden
It is easy to treat Scandinavia as one region, and for prayer times that is a mistake. In Denmark the prayer-time committee adopted the Diyanet table as the national reference, and in Sweden the imam council did the same, so in both countries the table this app serves and the national table are the same document. Norway went a different way: Islamsk Råd Norge worked out a common Norwegian timetable, Felles bønnetid, and that is what most Norwegian mosques print. The two are genuinely different — not a rounding difference but a convention difference of up to twenty minutes at fajr — so a claim that is true for Copenhagen and Stockholm is false for Oslo, and this page does not make it.
What the city pages below show
Each Norwegian city page shows today’s six times and a thirty-day table, and every row names its source. Where the app has Felles bønnetid for that city and day, the row is the council’s own time and is labelled “Islamsk Råd Norge timetable”. Otherwise the row comes from the timetable Diyanet publishes for Norwegian settlements and is labelled as a timetable published by an institution abroad, or, on a day neither table covers, it is calculated with fajr at eighteen degrees and isha at seventeen and labelled as calculated. Calculated days use the standard shadow-one asr. That choice is not a guess: the Norwegian national table itself publishes two afternoon columns and treats the shadow-one column as its primary one, and a full year of comparison of that one column put the shadow-one calculation about a minute from it on average while the shadow-two version sat nearly an hour away. Fajr and isha are where the other tables and Felles bønnetid diverge, which is why a 0-minute claim is made only for rows taken from Felles bønnetid.
Summer nights above the Arctic Circle
Tromsø sits at nearly 70 degrees north. For about two months either side of midsummer the sun never goes far enough below the horizon for fajr or isha to occur astronomically at all, and every Norwegian timetable has to decide what to print instead — a fixed interval after maghrib, an interpolation from the last day the angle was reached, or the times of a reference city further south. Bodø, Tromsø and the far north are where timetables disagree most, and where a printed local mosque calendar is more authoritative than any calculation. In winter the problem inverts: in December the sun in Tromsø does not rise, and dhuhr and asr fall within a short twilight in the middle of the day.
Following the national standard exactly
Rows taken from Felles bønnetid carry the council’s six times with no minutes added, for the dates the council has published; the council publishes the current year, so the next year’s rows appear once it does. In the app, the Islamsk Råd Norge timetable can also be selected directly. In both cases the claim is narrow and explicit: it holds for rows taken from the published timetable, and the app does not extrapolate a published table onto places or dates it was not published for.
Questions
Why is the Denmark and Sweden “0-minute difference” not repeated here?
How do I get the IRN times?
What happens to fajr and isha in Tromsø in June?
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