Five prayers, six rows
There are five daily prayers: Fajr, Dhuhr, Asr, Maghrib and Isha. The timetable has six rows because sunrise is on it, and sunrise is not a prayer. It is the end of the window for Fajr, which is prayed between the two.
The clock lists sunrise in a quieter grey for that reason, and never calls the adhan for it.
Two sources, one choice
A prayer time is an astronomical fact turned into a decision. The sun reaches a particular angle below the horizon, and a community decides that this is the moment. Because the second half of that sentence involves judgement, two careful people can arrive at times a few minutes apart and both be right.
Your clock deals with this by not pretending the question is settled. It ships with the timetable published by Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı for your town, and it lets you choose a calculation method instead if your community uses one.
The Diyanet timetable
Diyanet publishes prayer times for towns across Türkiye and Europe. These are the times most Turkish-speaking communities in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and France already follow, which is why the clock uses them by default. Two years of them are written to the device, so the clock does not need a network to know tomorrow’s Fajr.
If the published timetable cannot be reached, the clock keeps the one it already has and says so on the screen. It is never handed a calculation wearing the same name.
Calculation methods
Five methods are available. Each is a set of solar angles for Fajr and Isha. Choosing one replaces the stored timetable with times the clock computes for your coordinates.
| Method | Fajr | Isha |
|---|---|---|
| Muslim World League | 18° | 17° |
| Egyptian General Authority of Survey | 19,5° | 17,5° |
| Umm al-Qura, Makkah | 18,5° | 90 min |
| University of Islamic Sciences, Karachi | 18° | 18° |
| Islamic Society of North America | 15° | 15° |
The Asr rule is a separate choice: standard, where the shadow equals the length of the object, or Hanafi, where it is twice.
Northern latitudes
North of roughly forty-eight degrees the sun does not go far enough below the horizon in midsummer for the Fajr and Isha angles to occur at all. Brussels, Amsterdam and Berlin all sit in that band.
There is no single correct answer to what a clock should print on those nights, so the clock does not choose for you. It offers three high-latitude rules, and the screen says which one it is following. At Heusden-Zolder, 50.99 degrees north, using Muslim World League, they behave like this:
| Rule | Nights a year with no usable Isha |
|---|---|
| Angle based | 22 |
| Middle of the night | 30 |
| One seventh of the night | 0 |
The setting is one line in the device menu, not a hidden preference, and it is only offered for calculated methods: a published timetable has no formula to steer.
Adjusting for your mosque
If the mosque down the road calls Isha three minutes after the printed time, you can shift each prayer independently by up to thirty minutes. The adjustment is per prayer, it survives a power cut, and the clock does not quietly reset it.
The published time stays in storage untouched underneath, so it is always clear what came from the source and what you changed. This is not iqama: the clock does not pretend to know when your congregation stands.