Juz 14

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-Hijr 15:1 through An-Nahl 16:128. Al-Hijr recalls the rock-hewn dwellers of Thamud and God's pledge to preserve the revelation, while An-Nahl ('The Bee') is a long hymn to the signs of nature, rain, cattle, the bee and its honey, as evidence of the Creator's care.

Al-Hijr's brief but vivid account of the rock-cut dwellings of Thamud, read in this juz, corresponds to real archaeological remains at Mada'in Salih (also called Al-Hijr, and now known as Hegra) in north-western Arabia, Nabataean-period tomb facades of the first centuries BCE and CE cut into sandstone cliffs that continued to be pointed to by later Muslim travellers and geographers as physical evidence of the Quranic account, though the facades themselves considerably postdate the Thamud of the traditional narrative. An-Nahl's long catalogue of natural signs, rain, cattle, the bee, is one of the Quran's most sustained arguments from nature to Creator, and its material on the bee's honey (16:68-69) is regularly cited in later Islamic writing on medicine as well as theology.

Juz 14 is unusually clean at both ends: it opens exactly where Ibrahim leaves off and closes exactly where An-Nahl does, so its entire span consists of precisely two complete surahs, all ninety-nine verses of Al-Hijr and all one hundred and twenty-eight verses of An-Nahl, with no fragment of any other surah included on either side.

In communities that pace the nightly tarawih prayers of Ramadan at one juz per night, this is customarily the fourteenth night's portion, though many mosques recite faster to finish early in the month or slower to spread the reading further, and some congregations instead divide the whole Quran among thirty reciters for a single collective khatm. Huffaz reviewing memorised portions often pace themselves by a juz's two hizb and four quarter-hizb divisions rather than by surah, since these evenly sized units make a consistent daily review schedule possible regardless of where a surah boundary falls. Printed Mushafs typically mark each juz's opening in the margin with a small medallion inscribed with its number, a page-level convention distinct from the finer hizb and quarter-hizb marks placed within the text itself to guide reciters mid-portion. Some Mushaf editions additionally shade or border the margin differently for each hizb, so a reciter can judge progress through the juz at a glance without counting verses.