Prayer rooms & mosques
Where to pray across Korea — Seoul Central Mosque, regional mosques listed by the Korea Muslim Federation (KMF), and Incheon Airport prayer rooms, with qibla and wudu tips.
Mosques (masjid)
Korea's first mosque, opened in 1976. Prayer halls on 1F–2F and separate men's and women's wudu rooms. If your clothes are revealing, borrow a skirt or hijab at the gate. Halal restaurants, a halal butcher and grocers line the street outside.
Korea's second mosque, completed in September 1980 together with an Islamic centre.
Opened in 1986; its dome is paired with a Korean tiled hanok-style roof.
Run mainly by the Indonesian Muslim community.
Opened in 2001 and rebuilt in 2013; serves Muslims working in the Ansan industrial area.
Prayer rooms (musalla) & transit
Open 24 hours, per Incheon Airport. For Terminal 2, ask an airport information desk.
⏱ Hours vary — confirm at the info desk on arrival.
Practical tips
- · The Korea Muslim Federation gives the qibla from Seoul as west-northwest, about 286°. A compass app with a Mecca-direction mode works anywhere.
- · Carry a travel prayer mat — not every prayer space supplies one.
- · For wudu outside a mosque, accessible/family restrooms are the most practical.
- · The Korea Muslim Federation posts a monthly prayer timetable for Seoul at koreaislam.org — check it for Jumu'ah and Ramadan times.
Korea has no general expectation of prayer space, so the reliable places are the ones built for it and the ones built for travellers. The mosques below serve their neighbourhoods and hold Jumu'ah around one o'clock on Fridays; Incheon Airport has multi-faith rooms with wudu facilities in both terminals, landside and airside, which makes the arrival and departure days the easy ones to plan.
Everything between those two is worth confirming rather than assuming. Mall and department-store prayer rooms are being added steadily, but they move, and a room that existed last season may now be storage — ask at the information desk instead of walking to a floor. Outside prayer times, the practical approach most travellers settle on is to plan the day around the mosque districts, where the prayer space, the halal restaurants and the marts are within a few minutes of each other rather than scattered across a city.