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A Thirtieth of the Recitation Cycle

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A Thirtieth of the Recitation Cycle

A juz (plural ajza), also called a para in South Asia, is one of thirty roughly equal divisions of the written Quran. The division is made by length rather than by meaning, so a juz usually begins and ends in the middle of a surah; each is further split into two hizb and each hizb into quarters. Reciting one juz a night completes the whole Quran across a lunar month, a rhythm tied above all to Ramadan, when the entire text is recited in the nightly tarawih prayers. This portion spans An-Naba 78:1 through An-Nas 114:6. The final juz, Juz Amma, gathers the short, rhythmic Meccan surahs most Muslims learn first and recite in daily prayer. It runs from An-Naba ('The Tidings') through the Night of Decree (Al-Qadr), the declaration of God's oneness (Al-Ikhlas) and the two verses of refuge (Al-Falaq and An-Nas) that seal the Book.

Juz Amma, the final and shortest of the thirty divisions, gathers the Quran's most rhythmic and most memorised material, and its surahs are traditionally the first a Muslim child learns by heart, making this single juz, disproportionate to its modest share of the Quran's total length, the portion of the text most Muslims worldwide can recite from memory in full. Al-Ikhlas, its declaration of God's absolute oneness, is described in a widely transmitted hadith as equivalent in reward to reciting one third of the entire Quran, a tradition frequently cited to explain the surah's exceptionally frequent use in daily prayer despite its brevity.

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