Prayer Times in Morocco

Muslims and mosques in Morocco

Islam is the state religion of Morocco, and more than 99% of Moroccans are Muslim, almost all of them Sunni. The Maliki school of law is dominant: the Almoravid dynasty (1040 to 1147) made Maliki jurisprudence the most prominent in the country, and it has stayed so ever since. Islam came to the region in 681, when an Arab army under Uqba ibn Nafi, a general of the Umayyads, reached it. The Idrisid dynasty, which was Shia-leaning, ruled large parts of the country from 788, and the Almohads (1121 to 1269) later persecuted smaller sects, so that orthodox Sunni Islam prevailed.

In Morocco the state organises religion more than in most Muslim countries. The king holds the title of Commander of the Faithful, and the Ministry of Habous and Islamic Affairs runs the mosques and appoints the imams. From 2015 the government pursued a strategy to promote the Maliki school and counter Salafism, and in 2016 it removed passages judged to encourage violence from religious textbooks and cut the number of lessons from 50 to 24. A small Salafi movement exists, with figures such as Omar al-Haddouchi and Hassan Kettani, and in 2017 a book critical of Sahih al-Bukhari was banned for disturbing the country's 'spiritual security'.

The country's mosques include some of the best known in North Africa. The Qarawiyyin in Fez, founded in 859, is often described as one of the oldest universities in the world, and the Hassan II Mosque in Casablanca, completed in 1993, has one of the tallest minarets in the world and is built partly over the Atlantic. Millions of Moroccans also live abroad, mainly in France, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands and Italy, and many mosques there look to the Moroccan calendar.

For prayer times, the Ministry of Habous publishes a yearly timetable for each city, with Fajr at 19 degrees and Isha at 17 degrees and extra minutes added for sunrise, Dhuhr and Maghrib, and this site follows the same method as described by secondary sources, which we have not yet compared with the ministry's own tables, so the ministry's timetable remains the official reference. Morocco has one more particularity: during Ramadan the country sets its clocks back an hour, from UTC+1 to UTC+0, so the times shown here use the clock in force on each day. The start of Ramadan and Eid is announced by the Ministry of Habous after the crescent is sighted. Congregation times are set by each mosque.

Sources, checked 2026-10: Wikipedia: Islam in Morocco; Wikipedia: Hassan II Mosque; Wikipedia: University of al-Qarawiyyin; Ministry of Habous and Islamic Affairs.