Prayer Times in Switzerland

Muslims and mosques in Switzerland

Switzerland no longer counts religion in a full census, so the figures for Muslims come from surveys of the Federal Statistical Office. In 2013 there were 341,572 Muslims aged 15 or older, about 5.1% of the adult population, up from 56,600 people, or 0.9% of the population, in 1980. Of Swiss Muslims, 88.3% have an immigrant background, and according to the last census to ask, in 2000, 56.4% came from the former Yugoslavia, 20.2% from Turkey and 6% from Africa, including 3.4% from North Africa. About 10,000 of the roughly 400,000 Muslims are believed to be native Swiss converts. The community has therefore been built mostly by Balkan and Turkish families.

Muslims are concentrated on the German-speaking Swiss plateau. In 2017 the cantons with the highest shares were Basel-Stadt (8.17%), Glarus (7.72%) and Solothurn (7.63%), followed by Zürich at 6.49% and Geneva at 6.24%, and Geneva is the only canton outside the German-speaking region above the national average of 5.4%. Ticino has the lowest share, 1.82%. The Swiss mosque scene is mostly made of prayer rooms: an estimate from 2019 counts about 260 mosques and prayer rooms, and only four of them have a minaret.

One of the best known early mosques is the Mahmood Mosque in Zürich, built by the Ahmadiyya community in 1963. Politics has concentrated on mosque architecture: in November 2009 a popular initiative to ban new minarets was approved by 57.5% of voters, which did not affect the four existing ones, and the Bern city council had rejected plans for a large Islamic cultural centre in 2007. Muslim organisations have also been set up at different levels, including the umbrella groups GIOS (formed in Zürich in 1989), VIOZ (1995), KIOS (2000) and FIDS (2006), and the Islamic Central Council of Switzerland (IZRS), founded in 2009.

For prayer times, Switzerland lies between about 46 and 47.8 degrees north, a little below the latitude where the high-latitude rule begins to apply, but the summer twilight is still long and the gap between Fajr and Isha is short. The country is small, so times change by only about 13 minutes from Geneva in the west to St. Gallen in the east, though the Alps add late sunrises in the valleys. On this site's calculation the fast from Fajr to Maghrib in Zürich lasts about 19 hours on 21 June and 10 and a half hours on 21 December. Swiss mosques follow the calendars of the countries their members come from, such as Turkey, Kosovo, Bosnia and Arab countries, so neighbouring communities may start Ramadan and Eid on different days.

Sources, checked 2026-10: Wikipedia: Islam in Switzerland (Federal Statistical Office figures); Wikipedia: Minaret controversy in Switzerland.