Juz 24

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 Az-Zumar 39:32 through Fussilat 41:46. It contains the celebrated verse of hope, 'do not despair of the mercy of God' (39:53). Ghafir ('The Forgiver') preserves the plea of the believing man in Pharaoh's court, and Fussilat ('Explained in Detail') answers the Meccans who turned away from the revelation.

Ya-Sin's closing argument, that the God who first created the human from nothing can surely restore even scattered bones and dust (36:78-79), is frequently cited in later Islamic theology as a concise summary of the Quran's whole case for bodily resurrection, restated in different imagery across many surahs but rarely as compactly as here. As-Saffat's account of Abraham's readiness to sacrifice his son, unnamed in the Quranic text itself though widely identified in later tradition as Ishmael rather than Isaac, a point of clear divergence from the Genesis account naming Isaac, underlies the ritual sacrifice still performed at Eid al-Adha.

Juz 24 finishes Az-Zumar's last forty-four verses, then carries the whole of Ghafir, all eighty-five verses of it, before opening Fussilat and carrying all but the final eight of its fifty-four verses, a rare case of a juz stopping just short of a surah's own close rather than well before it or exactly on it, leaving only a small tail to open the following juz.

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