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 Al-Anam 6:111 through Al-Araf 7:87. The rest of Al-Anam argues the case for the one God against idolatry, then Al-Araf ('The Heights') opens with the fall of Adam and the refusal of Iblis, followed by the successive prophets sent to Noah's people, Ad, Thamud and the towns of Lot and Shuayb.
Al-Araf's opening account of Iblis's refusal to bow to Adam (7:11-18), read in this juz, gives one of the fullest Quranic tellings of the episode found more briefly elsewhere in the text, and its insistence that Iblis's fault was pride rather than ignorance became a central theme in later Islamic ethical and mystical writing on the nature of arrogance. The 'towns' of the disobedient peoples that follow, Ad, Thamud, and the towns of Lot and Shuayb, are presented as a repeating pattern rather than isolated stories, a structure of prophet, rejection and destruction that recurs so often across the Quran that classical scholars gave it its own technical name, qasas al-anbiya, the stories of the prophets.