Juz 27

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 Adh-Dhariyat 51:31 through Al-Hadid 57:29. A dense cluster: At-Tur ('The Mount'), An-Najm ('The Star') with the Prophet's vision, Al-Qamar ('The Moon') and the splitting sign, the refrain-poem Ar-Rahman ('The Most Merciful'), Al-Waqia ('The Inevitable Event') on the three ranks at Judgement, and Al-Hadid ('Iron').

Al-Ahqaf, opening this juz, is named for the wind-carved sand formations of southern Arabia associated with the destroyed people of Ad, a landscape early Muslim geographers continued to identify with real dune country in the region even as the historical Ad themselves left no securely identified archaeological trace. Al-Hujurat's teaching on manners and brotherhood, including its instruction to verify news from an unreliable source before acting on it (49:6), a verse traditionally connected to a specific reported incident involving a companion's mistaken report, has been cited in modern Islamic discussions of misinformation and verification as an early scriptural statement of the same principle.

Juz 27 finishes Adh-Dhariyat's last thirty verses, then carries six complete surahs in a row, At-Tur, An-Najm, Al-Qamar, Ar-Rahman, Al-Waqia and Al-Hadid, forty-nine, sixty-two, fifty-five, seventy-eight, ninety-six and twenty-nine verses respectively, ending precisely on Al-Hadid's final verse. The stretch of shorter surahs beginning here continues to yield dense, whole-surah juz divisions through much of the rest of the Quran.

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