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The Burj Khalifa Has Three Official Sunset Times

The Burj Khalifa is 828 metres tall with about 160 floors, and its highest occupied floor sits at 585 metres. This creates a problem that almost no other building on Earth has to solve.

Because of the curvature of the planet, the higher you are, the later the sun sets for you. The relationship is roughly linear at these heights: sunset arrives about one minute later for every 1.5 kilometres of altitude.

During Ramadan this stops being trivia and becomes a genuine religious question, because the fast ends when the sun has actually set — and the day, in Islamic tradition, does not end until the disc of the sun has fully disappeared. Someone on the 140th floor can still see it after someone on the ground cannot.

So the Grand Mufti of Dubai, Dr Ahmad Al Haddad, issued a fatwa dividing the tower into three:

• Floors 1–80: standard Dubai timing. Break the fast when the call to Maghrib prayer sounds.
• Floors 80–150 (from roughly 414 metres): break the fast two minutes later, and begin the fast two minutes earlier at dawn.
• Floors 151 and above: three minutes later, and three minutes earlier at dawn.

Evening and night prayers shift by the same amounts. His reasoning was direct: people up there can still see the disc of the sun — how can they end their fast?

Because the 80th floor is around 300 metres, the ruling also applies to the upper levels of several other Dubai towers, including the Princess Tower, Almas Tower and the JW Marriott Marquis. It affects the restaurant on the 122nd floor and the observation deck above it.

The clock: every other city in this series argues about time in degrees of longitude. Madrid is an hour off because of a decision made in 1940. Istanbul is sixty-four minutes off because of where the 45th meridian happens to fall.

Dubai is the only city on the list where the disagreement is vertical, and where the answer to "what time is sunset here" legitimately depends on which lift button you pressed.

Three families can live in the same building, watch the same sun go down, and correctly break their fast at three different moments.

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