Two-way sync · conflict-aware
Prayer times in Google Calendar, placed around your meetings
Sutrah adds the five daily prayers to Google Calendar as real events, then reads your existing busy times and places each block in a genuine gap inside that prayer's valid window. When a meeting lands on a block, it moves. Times recalculate nightly from your coordinates, so nothing needs resyncing.
What makes this different from a recurring event
Most people have already tried the obvious version: a repeating 12:30 block called “Dhuhr”. It fails for two reasons, and both are structural rather than a matter of discipline.
The first is that prayer times move. Dhuhr in London shifts by roughly 40 minutes across the year, and Maghrib by more than four hours. A fixed clock time is wrong within weeks and badly wrong within a season.
The second is that a fixed block collides with work. It lands on the standup, you decline it, and after the third decline you stop seeing it. The block was never defending the time — it was only labelling it.
A prayer has a window, not a moment. Dhuhr remains valid for hours. So instead of asserting one time, Sutrah reads your Google Calendar for that day, finds where the window and your free time actually overlap, and puts the block there.
The permission, stated exactly
Connecting Google is the moment most people hesitate, so here is the precise scope rather than a reassuring paraphrase:
| Scope | What it allows |
|---|---|
calendar.events.owned | Read event times on your calendar, and create, update or delete only events Sutrah created. It cannot modify or delete anything else, by design of the scope itself. |
openid email profile | Create your account and identify you at sign-in. |
Google publishes calendar.events.owned as a narrower alternative to the general calendar.events scope. Most calendar tools request the broader one. There is no Gmail scope, no Drive scope and no Contacts scope in the list, which means reading your email is not something Sutrah has chosen not to do — it is something it cannot do.
The full data-handling detail, including sub-processors, is on the IT access brief and the privacy page.
What it does with your busy times
Placement needs to know when you are booked, so a sync reads the start and end times of your events for the days it is scheduling. Those times are held in memory while the gaps are worked out and then discarded. What gets stored is the prayer blocks Sutrah created: a time, a status, and the identifier of the event it wrote.
Prayer times themselves come from the open-source adhan library using published astronomical conventions. If you want to understand why two apps can disagree about Asr, that is the shadow-length rule, and the calculation methods guide covers the Fajr and Isha angles.
If your Workspace admin blocks third-party apps
Plenty of organisations require admin approval before any OAuth app can touch a work account. If the connection fails with an administrator message, that is what happened — it is not a fault with your account.
The IT brief is written for exactly this: it lists the scopes, what is done with the data, and the sub-processors, and it ends with a copy-paste email you can forward. If approval is not going to happen, the subscription feed works on locked-down Outlook and Google accounts too. You lose conflict-aware placement, because nothing can read your meetings, but the times still arrive.
Setting it up on Google Calendar
- 1
Sign in with Google
Use the Google account that owns the calendar the blocks should appear on. If that is your work account and it is locked down, see the admin note below.
- 2
Set where you pray
Pick your city or drop a pin. This sets your coordinates and timezone, which is what the times are calculated from.
- 3
Choose your calculation method and madhab
Match whatever your local masjid follows — method, Asr madhab, and a high-latitude rule if you are far north or south.
- 4
Let the blocks land
Three months of prayer events appear on your primary calendar, each inside its valid window and around your existing meetings. From then on it runs nightly on its own.
Frequently asked questions
- What permission does Sutrah ask for on Google?
- The calendar.events.owned scope, plus openid, email and profile for sign-in. The owned variant is narrower than the calendar scope most apps request: it can only modify events that Sutrah itself created, so it is technically incapable of editing or deleting your other events. It gives no access to Gmail, Drive or Contacts.
- Can Sutrah read my meeting titles?
- Only start and end times by default, which is all that is needed to tell a free hour from a booked one. Titles are inspected only if you switch travel mode on, and then only to spot airline and airport codes so prayer times can follow you to a destination. Your other event titles are never stored.
- What will my colleagues see on my calendar?
- An event named after the prayer, showing as busy by default. You can rename what appears, set any prayer to show as free, or turn a prayer off entirely. Many people rename theirs to something neutral like 'Focus time' — the placement logic works the same either way.
- What happens when someone books over a prayer block?
- Sutrah notices the change and re-runs placement for that day, moving the block to another open slot inside the same prayer's valid window. If the entire window is genuinely full, it tells you rather than silently dropping the prayer.
- My work Google account blocks the connection. What now?
- That usually means the Workspace admin requires approval before third-party apps can connect. The /for-it page lists the exact scopes and data handling, with a copy-paste email you can send to whoever runs IT. If approval is not possible, the webcal feed still delivers the times without any connection.
- Is it free?
- Yes, with no card and no trial that expires. The city pages and the printable timetable generator do not even need an account.
Other calendars
Still deciding whether you need this at all rather than the prayer app already on your phone? We compare Sutrah with the ones people actually use, including what each of them does better.
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