Juz 20

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-Naml 27:56 through Al-Ankabut 29:45. Al-Qasas ('The Story') recovers the early life of Moses, his rescue from the Nile, his flight to Midian and his call, and the fall of the tyrant Qarun (Korah). Al-Ankabut ('The Spider') then likens the false patrons of the idolaters to a spider's fragile web.

Ash-Shuara's recurring refrain, in which prophet after prophet, Noah, Hud, Salih, Lot, Shuayb, is rejected by his own people in strikingly parallel language, gives the surah its structural character and has made it a frequently cited example, in studies of the Quran's literary form, of deliberate repetition used to reinforce a single theological point across many historical settings. An-Naml's account of Solomon, read in the same juz, is unusual among Quranic prophetic material for including extended dialogue with non-human figures, the hoopoe bird and the ant that warns its colony (27:18-19), a narrative register distinct from the warner-and-rejection pattern that dominates the surahs around it.

Juz 20 finishes An-Naml's last thirty-eight verses, then carries the whole of Al-Qasas, all eighty-eight verses recounting the upbringing and calling of Moses, before opening Al-Ankabut and carrying about two-thirds of its sixty-nine verses. As with several other juz in this stretch of the Quran, a single narrative surah sits entirely within one nightly recitation portion.

In communities that pace the nightly tarawih prayers of Ramadan at one juz per night, this is customarily the twentieth 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.