Picture a hotel room in a city you've never visited. Beige walls, blackout curtains, a window facing — honestly, you have no idea what it's facing. Prayer time is in twenty minutes. Somewhere on this planet, in a stone courtyard in Makkah, stands a cube-shaped building draped in black and gold, and your one job right now is to figure out exactly which way it is from this exact anonymous room.
Every practicing Muslim knows this small, universal moment. It has been repeated billions of times across fourteen centuries — in caravanserais and airports, on ships and space stations (yes, really; we'll get to the astronaut). The direction being sought has a name: the qibla. And the story of how humans find it is one of my favorite stories in all of applied science, because it runs in an unbroken line from a 7th-century mosque in Madinah, through the greatest mathematicians of the medieval world, straight into the sensors of the phone in your hand — and, on this very page, into a free tool we built that finds your qibla in about one second, with a live compass, an astronomical sun-calibration trick for laptops, and an interactive map. This article is the complete guide: what the qibla means and when it was established, the genuinely beautiful mathematics of pointing at a building across a curved planet, why your phone's compass lies to you and how to catch it, the two magical days each year when the sun itself becomes your qibla finder, and every practical technique for getting it right anywhere on Earth.
Embed This Qibla Compass on Your Own Website — Free Widget Code
Before the history and the mathematics, a practical gift: everything this article describes — the instant location detection with its VPN-proof timezone shield, the live phone compass that glows and vibrates at alignment, the sun calibration with its live clock and day phase, the interactive map with the golden great-circle line, fullscreen mode, and all six languages — ships inside one small snippet you can paste into any website: a mosque homepage, a community blog, a travel guide, an Islamic school portal. The code reads your page's own lang attribute and serves each visitor the matching language automatically, and the frame resizes itself to fit whichever view your visitor opens.
Method 1 — Direct embed (iframe)
Paste this where the compass should live; the companion script matches your site's language and keeps the height perfectly fitted — use the copy button on the block:
<iframe id="tq_qibla_direction" src="https://tools.tooliqo.co/qibla-direction/?lang=en" title="Tooliqo" loading="lazy" scrolling="no" style="width:100%;max-width:100%;height:820px;border:0;overflow:hidden;display:block;margin:0 auto;"></iframe>
<script>(function(){var i="tq_qibla_direction",b="https://tools.tooliqo.co/qibla-direction/",dl="en";function L(){try{var h=(document.documentElement.getAttribute("lang")||"").toLowerCase();var ok=["ar","en","fr","es","zh","hi"];for(var k=0;k<ok.length;k++){if(h.indexOf(ok[k])===0)return ok[k];}}catch(e){}return dl;}function R(){var f=document.getElementById(i);if(!f)return;var lg=L();if(lg){var want=b+"?lang="+lg;if((f.getAttribute("src")||"").indexOf("lang="+lg)===-1)f.setAttribute("src",want);}window.addEventListener("message",function(e){var d=e.data;if(!d||typeof d.tqHeight!=="number"||d.tqHeight<50)return;try{if(f.contentWindow&&e.source&&e.source!==f.contentWindow)return;}catch(x){}f.style.height=(d.tqHeight+20)+"px";},false);}if(document.readyState==="loading"){document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded",R);}else{R();}})();</script>
One optional refinement: to guarantee the live phone compass works inside the frame on every browser, you can add allow="accelerometer; gyroscope; magnetometer" to the iframe tag — everything else works fully without it.
Method 2 — Smart script (recommended)
Or skip configuration entirely: drop this placeholder anywhere and our loader builds the frame, matches the language, and manages the height on its own — the cleanest route if you also embed our prayer times tool on the same page:
<div class="tooliqo-tool" data-tool="qibla-direction" data-lang="en"></div> <script src="https://tools.tooliqo.co/embed.js" async></script>
Swap lang=en (or data-lang) for ar, fr, es, zh, or hi to pin a language, or leave it and the snippet mirrors your page automatically. Free for any site, with the © Tooliqo credit kept visible. Right — back to that hotel room.
What "Qibla" Means — and the Day the Direction Changed
The Arabic word qibla comes from a root meaning "to face" — the qibla is simply the direction a Muslim faces in prayer, and that direction is the Kaaba: the ancient cube-shaped sanctuary at the center of the Sacred Mosque in Makkah, which Muslims believe was built by the Prophet Ibrahim (Abraham) and his son Ismail as the first house dedicated to the worship of the one God. To be precise about what everyone is actually pointing at: the Kaaba stands at latitude 21.4225° North, longitude 39.8262° East. Remember those coordinates — every qibla calculation on Earth, including the one running in the tool above, is aimed at them.
Here's the part of the story many people, even many Muslims, only half-remember. The qibla was not always Makkah. For roughly the first year and a half after the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ migrated to Madinah, the Muslim community prayed facing Jerusalem — Bayt al-Maqdis — sharing a direction with earlier prophetic traditions. Then, in the second year after the Hijra (around 624 CE), revelation arrived that Muslims understand as answering the Prophet's own quiet longing: "Indeed We see the turning of your face toward heaven, so We will surely turn you to a qibla with which you will be pleased. So turn your face toward al-Masjid al-Haram..." (Quran 2:144).
The change was so immediate that, according to the famous accounts, one congregation literally pivoted mid-prayer — the imam and rows of worshippers turning nearly 180 degrees between one bowing and the next. A mosque in Madinah commemorates that moment to this day: Masjid al-Qiblatayn, "the Mosque of the Two Qiblas," one of the very few buildings on Earth named after a change of direction. Visit it and you're standing where geography, revelation, and devotion intersected in a single afternoon.
One theological note worth making early, because it dissolves a lot of anxiety about precision: Muslims do not worship the Kaaba, and the direction is not about the stone itself. The qibla is a unifier — a single point that turns hundreds of millions of scattered individual prayers into concentric rings of one global congregation. Picture the planet from above at any prayer hour: circles of people on every continent, all oriented toward the same courtyard. That image, more than any formula, is what this whole article is really about.
Thirteen Centuries of Qibla Science (Before a Single Satellite)
How do you point at a building thousands of kilometers away, across deserts and oceans, without GPS? The history of answering that question is a history of mathematics itself.
The first generation used what navigators use: the sky. Companions traveling from Makkah knew the roads and the stars along them; early rules of thumb oriented prayer by sunrise points, the pole star, or prevailing winds, region by region. It worked well enough for a community clustered in Arabia — but within a century Islam stretched from the Atlantic to Central Asia, and "roughly that way" started to strain.
Enter the mathematicians. Determining the qibla from an arbitrary location is, formally, a problem in spherical trigonometry: given two points on a sphere (your city and Makkah), find the initial bearing of the shortest arc between them. Medieval Muslim scholars attacked this problem with astonishing seriousness — historians of science treat "ilm al-qibla" (the science of the qibla) as one of the driving applications behind the entire development of spherical trigonometry. Al-Khwarizmi (yes, the algorithm guy) worked on approximate solutions in 9th-century Baghdad. Habash al-Hasib developed an elegant "analemma" construction. And then came al-Biruni, the 11th-century polymath, whose book Tahdid Nihayat al-Amakin ("The Determination of the Coordinates of Cities") is essentially a masterclass written to solve one concrete task: computing the precise qibla of the city of Ghazni. To do it, he needed accurate latitudes and longitudes — so he measured the Earth's radius using a mountain and trigonometry, coming remarkably close to the modern value, and cataloged coordinates for cities across the known world. Read that chain again: a man measured the planet so his city could face a building correctly. If that doesn't make you love this subject, nothing will.
The science then became hardware. Astrolabes shipped with qibla markings. Ottoman and Persian workshops produced the qibla-numa — pocket compasses with city lists engraved around the rim: set the needle, rotate to your city's mark, and the pointer showed the qibla, magnetic error and all. Most stunning of all, scholars have identified brass Makkah-centered world maps from Safavid Persia (17th century) engraved with a grid so mathematically clever that laying a ruler from any city to the center reads off both the qibla bearing and the distance — a cartographic projection with properties European mathematics would formally describe only much later. And in every major mosque, the direction was frozen into architecture as the mihrab, the niche in the qibla wall — which is why archaeologists can study medieval mihrab orientations today and literally watch the accuracy of Islamic mathematical geography improve century by century.
The modern era compressed all of it. National geographic surveys fixed coordinates; the 20th century brought printed qibla tables; GPS satellites made "where am I?" trivial; and smartphones bundled a magnetometer next to the processor. In 2007, when Malaysian astronaut Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor prayed aboard the International Space Station — orbiting the planet every 92 minutes — Malaysia's religious authority issued guidance famously ranking the intentions: face the Kaaba if possible, else its projection on Earth, else Earth itself, else wherever is practicable. Thirteen centuries after Masjid al-Qiblatayn, the qibla question had gone orbital, and the tradition answered with the same blend of rigor and mercy it always had.
The Beautiful Math: Why New York Prays Facing Northeast
Now the part that breaks everyone's brain the first time, and delights them the second time.
Open a standard wall map of the world. Put your finger on New York, and the Kaaba sits far to the southeast — so the qibla from New York must be southeast, right? Ask our calculator, though, and it answers with quiet confidence: 58° from true north. That's northeast. Not a typo. When this result spread through North American communities in the 1990s alongside consumer GPS, it sparked a genuine, sometimes heated debate — southeast versus northeast — complete with dueling pamphlets. The northeast camp won, because the northeast camp had the sphere on its side.
Here's the intuition, no equations required. The Earth is (very nearly) a sphere, and on a sphere the shortest path between two points is not a straight line on a flat map — it's an arc of a great circle, the circle you'd get by slicing the planet straight through its center via both points. Flat world maps, especially the everyday Mercator projection, massively distort these arcs: Mercator was engineered in 1569 so that constant compass bearings draw as straight lines (sailors loved it), which necessarily bends the actual shortest paths into misleading curves. Pilots live in the true geometry — that's why your Dubai–Los Angeles flight arcs up over Greenland and looks "wrong" on the seat-back map while being exactly right on the globe.
The qibla, by the consensus of the mathematical tradition from al-Biruni onward and of modern authorities, follows the same rule: it is the initial bearing of the great-circle arc from you to the Kaaba — the direction you'd start walking to reach Makkah by the shortest possible path over the planet's surface. From New York, that shortest path exits toward the northeast, sails near the North Atlantic's high latitudes, and descends across Europe into Arabia. Stretch a string between the two cities on a physical globe and you'll see it with your own eyes in ten seconds; it remains the single best demonstration I know.
When we built the calculation engine for this tool, we implemented that great-circle bearing directly in your browser — pure trigonometry aimed at 21.4225° N, 39.8262° E, no server round-trip, working even offline once loaded — and then validated it against known reference values city by city. A few of our actual test results, so you can sanity-check your own intuition:
· New York, USA — Qibla bearing: 58.5° (ENE) · Distance: ≈ 10,306 km
· Madrid, Spain — Qibla bearing: 104.0° (ESE) · Distance: ≈ 4,598 km
· Paris, France — Qibla bearing: 119.2° (ESE) · Distance: ≈ 4,496 km
· Beijing, China — Qibla bearing: 278.9° (W, very slightly north) · Distance: ≈ 7,386 km
· New Delhi, India — Qibla bearing: 266.6° (W, slightly south) · Distance: ≈ 3,835 km
· Cairo, Egypt — Qibla bearing: 136.1° (SE) · Distance: ≈ 1,287 km
· Rabat, Morocco — Qibla bearing: 94.6° (E, very slightly south) · Distance: ≈ 4,758 km
The same engine computes your distance to the Kaaba along that arc (the tool shows it beside the bearing, switching automatically between kilometers and miles by country). And for completeness, one delicious edge case: at the Kaaba's exact antipode — a spot in the remote South Pacific — every direction is equally "toward" Makkah, and all great circles from there converge on the courtyard. If you ever pray on a boat at that coordinate, congratulations: you cannot possibly face the wrong way.
Does a degree or two matter? Juristically, the classical position is generous: those far from Makkah are asked to face the direction (jiha) sincerely and carefully, not to achieve laser alignment — a mercy that predates compasses, let alone apps. The tradition asks for your honest best effort with the means available. It's just that today, the honest best effort costs one second and zero effort, so why not take it?
True North, Magnetic North, and Why Your Phone Compass Lies
Here's the trap that catches almost everyone comparing tools: there are two norths, and they disagree.
True north is geographic — the direction of the North Pole, the axis the planet spins on. Every qibla bearing worth trusting, including every number our tool displays, is measured from true north, because the great-circle math lives on the geographic grid. Magnetic north is where a compass needle points: the wandering pole of Earth's magnetic field, currently drifting through the Arctic at tens of kilometers per year. The gap between them at your location is called magnetic declination, and it is anything but negligible — near zero in some regions, more than 10–20° in parts of North America and northern Europe, and changing measurably year over year as the field evolves.
So when someone stands with a bare magnetic compass, dials in "94°," and finds it disagrees with a calculated tool by several degrees — both can be internally consistent; they're speaking two different norths. Serious digital compasses (including the sensor fusion in modern phones) attempt to correct for declination automatically, but that brings us to the second, grubbier problem: your phone's magnetometer is a tiny, easily bullied instrument. Magnetic phone-case clasps, car dashboards, steel desks, laptop speakers, even the magnets in your earbuds sitting in the same pocket — all of them bend the local field and swing the reading, sometimes wildly. Every experienced user has watched a phone compass insist that north is over there, then over there, within the same minute.
This is why our live compass mode comes with two built-in honesty features. First, the figure-8 calibration ritual: waving the phone through a figure-eight pattern lets the sensor sample the field in many orientations and cancel out its own biases — the tool reminds you, because it genuinely works. Second, the number never lies even when the needle might: the calculated bearing from true north sits right there in the stats, so you can always cross-check the spinning dial against an independent reference — a street map, the sun, or the map mode we'll meet below. On iPhones, one more honest hiccup: Apple requires a one-time permission tap before any website may read motion sensors, so the tool presents a clear "enable live compass" button rather than failing silently. Grant it, hold the phone flat, turn slowly — and when you're within about four degrees of the qibla, the dial glows gold, a gentle vibration confirms it, and a message tells you plainly: you are now facing the qibla.
No Compass? No Problem: The Desktop Solutions (Including the Sun)
Now for the challenge that made us genuinely proud of this tool's engineering. Laptops and desktops have no magnetometer at all. The browser physically cannot know which way your screen faces. Most qibla websites quietly ignore this — they show a needle pointing "94°" on a dial whose north is just... the top of your monitor, which relates to your actual room in no way whatsoever. The number is right; the picture is meaningless. We refused to ship that, so the tool carries three independent solutions.
Solution one: the sun, your free orbital compass. There is exactly one object visible from every backyard on Earth whose direction can be computed to fractions of a degree at any moment: the sun. Astronomers call its compass direction the solar azimuth, and it's pure math — latitude, longitude, date, time in; direction out. We built that astronomy straight into the tool and validated it against a professional reference library across six worldwide test locations: maximum deviation, 0.039 degrees. During daylight, a small golden sun icon appears on the compass dial at the sun's true current azimuth, with a status line above it showing your local time and the day phase — near sunrise, mid-morning, solar noon, afternoon, or near sunset — so you always know this is the live sun, not some fixed sunrise assumption. Then the trick: drag the dial to rotate it until the on-screen sun icon points at the actual sun outside your window (or exactly opposite a vertical pen's shadow, since shadows point directly away from the sun). The instant those align, the entire dial is physically oriented to reality — and the Kaaba-tipped arrow is pointing at the qibla in your room. It's a 21st-century interface running 11th-century logic, and honestly, aligning it feels a little like magic every time. (Fun validation story: during testing, the phase line said "afternoon" at what my mental math insisted was still morning — until I recomputed and found true solar noon in Agadir that day fell at 12:44 UTC. The tool was right; I was wrong. Twice.)
Solution two: the map, your streets as a compass. Tap "map view" and an interactive map loads on demand, centered on you, with a golden geodesic line — the actual great-circle arc — drawn from your marker toward a Kaaba icon. Now orientation stops being abstract: you can see the line pass over the bakery on the corner, cross the boulevard at that angle, aim between those two buildings you know. Align your body with landmarks you recognize and you're done. Better still, the marker is draggable and the map is clickable, so you can refine your position to the exact building — even the exact courtyard — and watch the bearing and distance recalculate live. For location precision, nothing else in the tool beats it.
Solution three: Wi-Fi positioning. A pleasant surprise to many: the "precise location" button works on laptops too. Desktop browsers resolve position from surrounding Wi-Fi networks, typically to within tens of meters — no satellite antenna required.
And at night, when the sun clocks out? The tool notices (it knows the sun's altitude, after all) and swaps the sun instructions for a gentle pointer toward the map or a phone. Small touch; saves confusion.
Two Days a Year, the Sun Stands Over the Kaaba
I've saved the most poetic technique for its own section, because it deserves one. Twice every year, the sun passes directly overhead the Kaaba — an event called Istiwa al-A'zam, the great alignment. It happens around May 27–28 at roughly 12:18 pm Makkah time, and again around July 15–16 at roughly 12:27 pm Makkah time (the exact minute shifts slightly year to year).
Think through what that means. At that instant, a straight line from the sun to the center of the Earth passes through Makkah. So anywhere on the sunlit half of the planet, the sun's direction at that moment is the qibla's direction — and every vertical object's shadow points exactly away from the Kaaba. No compass, no phone, no electricity: plant a stick upright, wait for the announced minute (convert Makkah time to yours), mark the shadow, and face its reverse. Communities from West Africa to Europe to South Asia use these dates to verify mosque mihrabs with nothing but sunlight — a mass, planet-wide calibration event that costs nothing and predates every gadget. If you're reading this in mid-July, check the date: the summer alignment may be days away, and there's no more satisfying way to fact-check a qibla tool than with a shadow. (Ours passes. We checked.)
Everything Working Together: A Tour of the Tool
Let me stitch the pieces into the actual thirty-second experience, because features scattered across sections undersell how simple it feels in practice.
You open the page. Within about a second — no permission popups — your city and country appear with your flag, resolved from the network edge, cross-checked by the same timezone shield we built for our prayer times tool: if a VPN, corporate gateway, or travel eSIM makes your traffic exit in another country, the tool notices your device's timezone disagrees, trusts your device, and quietly relocates to where your body actually is. (Moroccan reader on a Dutch VPN? You'll see Casablanca, in Arabic, at 94° — we tested precisely this.) The compass renders with the gold, Kaaba-tipped arrow at your bearing; beside it, the bearing in degrees from true north with its compass name, and your distance to the Kaaba in km or miles.
On a phone, you tap the pulsing "enable live compass," grant the one-time sensor permission on iOS, do a lazy figure-8, and rotate until the dial glows and buzzes at alignment — with a fullscreen mode that blows the compass up to fill your display and even keeps the screen awake while you turn, because nothing ruins the moment like a lock screen. On a laptop, you drag-rotate to the live sun (its status line confirming the current time and day phase), or hop into the map and line yourself up with your own street. Manual city entry with localized search, precise Wi-Fi/GPS positioning, six languages with full right-to-left Arabic, layouts that reshape from small phones to a wide two-column tablet and desktop view, multiple copies embeddable on one page, and zero data stored about you anywhere — it's all in there, and all of it exists because some real person hit the exact snag it solves.
Finding the Qibla Indoors: Homes, Offices, and Hotel Rooms
All the theory above meets reality in one place: a room with four walls and no obvious clues. Since "how do I find the qibla at home?" is probably the single most-asked version of this whole question, here is the field method we actually use, refined into a repeatable routine.
Step one: get your number once, keep it forever. Your qibla bearing is a property of your coordinates — it does not change with seasons, weather, or time of day. Open the tool, confirm your city (or drag the map marker to your exact building), and note the degrees from true north: say, 94°. That number is now permanently true for your home. Write it somewhere if you like; you've just done the hard part for the rest of your life at this address.
Step two: anchor it to the room. A number needs a reference. Indoors, your best references are, in rough order of reliability: the map view (see which wall the golden line exits through — "out the kitchen window, across the neighbor's roof" is a perfectly rigorous qibla description); a window with a clear view of the sun during daylight (drag-align the dial's sun icon and read the arrow against your furniture); or a phone's live compass held far from the television, the refrigerator, radiators, and anything with speakers — walk to the middle of the room, calibrate with a figure-8, and let the dial settle. Once the direction is anchored, mark it subtly: the corner of a rug, the edge of a shelf, a picture frame's alignment. Most Muslim households end up with exactly such a quiet marker, and guests who pray will silently thank you for it.
Hotel rooms deserve their own paragraph, because they combine every difficulty: unknown orientation, steel-framed construction that bullies magnetometers, and windows that may face a lightwell. In order: check the ceiling and drawers first — a remarkable number of hotels across the Muslim world and the Gulf, and increasingly worldwide, place a small qibla arrow sticker on the ceiling or a card in the desk (trust but verify it against your number). No sticker? Open the map view: hotels are easy to pinpoint precisely, and the golden line against the street grid you just walked usually settles it in seconds. Still stuck on a cloudy night in a steel tower? Fall back on the juristic mercy we covered earlier: investigate sincerely with the best means available, face your considered best estimate, and pray with a settled heart — that has been the ruling for travelers since long before hotels had ceilings to sticker.
Offices and classrooms add one social wrinkle: you often can't rearrange the space. The trick is translating the bearing into the room's own geometry — "45° off the long wall, toward the window corner" — which you compute once with the map or compass and then simply remember. And a final note on prayer rugs with built-in compasses: charming, but the small magnetic needles are especially vulnerable to floors with steel rebar and to the rug's own decorative threads; treat them as a rough check, never as the referee against a calculated bearing.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which direction is the qibla from the United States — southeast or northeast?
Northeast across most of the US and Canada (New York is about 58° from true north), because the qibla follows the shortest great-circle arc over the globe, not the straight line on a flat map. Stretch a string on a physical globe from your city to Makkah and watch it head northeast — the demonstration that settled the famous 1990s debate.
Why does my phone's compass app disagree with this tool by a few degrees?
Usually one of three culprits: magnetic declination (magnetic vs. true north), interference from nearby metal or magnets, or an uncalibrated sensor. Do the figure-8 calibration, step away from cars and steel furniture, and compare against the tool's map mode or the sun icon — the calculated bearing from true north is the stable reference.
How accurate does the qibla really need to be?
Classical scholarship asks those far from Makkah to face the general direction sincerely — a few degrees of honest error don't invalidate prayer. That said, precision now costs one second, and the tool's math is exact for your coordinates; the only real-world error left is how carefully you physically align, which the live compass, sun method, and map each solve in their own way.
Can I find the qibla with no compass, no internet, and no phone?
Yes — with the sun. Easiest version: on the Istiwa al-A'zam dates (around May 27–28 and July 15–16), at the announced Makkah-noon minute, a vertical stick's shadow points exactly away from the Kaaba anywhere in the sunlit hemisphere. On ordinary days, note your bearing once from the tool, then remember it relative to sunrise/sunset lines or your street grid.
What exactly is the sun icon on the compass — sunrise, sunset, or noon?
Neither — it's the sun's live position right now, recomputed every minute from your coordinates and the current time, with a status line showing your local clock and the day phase (near sunrise, mid-morning, solar noon, afternoon, near sunset). That's what makes the drag-to-align calibration valid at any daylight moment, not just at special times.
Does the map's golden line really show the direction through my streets?
Yes — it's the true great-circle path from your marker to the Kaaba, drawn over real map data. Zoom in, note which landmarks it crosses near you, and align with those. Drag the marker to your exact building for the most precise bearing the tool can produce.
I'm on a VPN — will the tool place me in the wrong country?
It shouldn't. The timezone shield compares your network's apparent location with your device's timezone and sides with the device when they conflict, so a Dutch exit node won't move a Moroccan user's qibla. If you genuinely travel, the changed device timezone triggers a fresh detection.
Why does iPhone ask permission before the live compass works?
Apple requires a one-time user tap before any website can read motion and orientation sensors — a privacy safeguard, not a malfunction. Tap "enable live compass," approve once, and it works for the session; everything else in the tool functions fully without it.
Is anything about my location stored?
No profiles, no server-side history. Your position is used in-browser for the math, and your preferences (language, saved city) live only in your own device's storage.
One Direction, Fourteen Centuries of Ingenuity
From a congregation pivoting mid-prayer in Madinah, to al-Biruni measuring the Earth so Ghazni could face Makkah, to brass Makkah-centered maps, to a shadow on two summer days, to a magnetometer beside the chip in your pocket — the qibla has always been where devotion hires the best science available and the science shows up honored to be asked. The tool on this page is our link in that chain: exact great-circle math validated city by city, a live compass that admits its sensor's weaknesses and hands you the calibration ritual, a sun that tells you the time and phase so you can trust it, a map that speaks in your own streets, and a design that treats your privacy as non-negotiable.
Scroll up and try it — spin your chair, drag the dial to the sun, watch the golden line cross your neighborhood. And once you know which way, you'll want to know when: our companion Prayer Times tool computes your city's five daily prayers with 21 official calculation methods and a live countdown, built on the same location engine and the same principles. Both are free, both live in the growing Islamic tools collection at Tooliqo, and both exist because we needed them ourselves — in beige hotel rooms, facing curtains, twenty minutes before prayer.
May you always find the direction — in every sense.