Juz 19

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-Furqan 25:21 through An-Naml 27:55. The close of Al-Furqan portrays the humble 'servants of the Most Merciful.' Ash-Shuara ('The Poets') recounts prophet after prophet meeting rejection, and An-Naml ('The Ant') tells of Solomon, the ant, the hoopoe and the Queen of Sheba.

An-Nur's vindication of Aisha, the Prophet's wife, against an accusation of infidelity circulated by some in Medina, an episode known in the tradition as hadith al-ifk, the affair of the slander, occupies a substantial passage in this juz (24:11-20) and became a foundational text in later Islamic law on the punishment for slanderous accusations of unchastity (qadhf) and on the number of witnesses required to establish such a charge. Al-Furqan, which follows, takes its name from a term meaning criterion or discernment, used elsewhere in the Quran for the Torah as well, and the surah's closing portrait of the 'servants of the Most Merciful' (25:63-77) is frequently anthologised on its own as a summary of Quranic ethical ideals.

Juz 19 finishes Al-Furqan's last fifty-seven verses, then carries the whole of Ash-Shuara, all two hundred and twenty-seven verses of it despite being one of the Quran's longer surahs, before opening An-Naml and carrying just over half of its ninety-three verses. A surah of considerable length is nonetheless carried complete within the fixed length of a single juz.

In communities that pace the nightly tarawih prayers of Ramadan at one juz per night, this is customarily the nineteenth 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, and 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 these finer internal marks. Many print editions, including the widely used 604-page Uthmani Mushaf standardised by Saudi Arabia's King Fahd Complex, begin each juz on a fresh page and hold each to roughly twenty pages, letting a reciter track a night's target by page count alone without consulting verse numbers.