Juz 28

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-Mujadila 58:1 through At-Tahrim 66:12. A run of Medinan surahs on community life: Al-Mujadila ('The Pleading Woman'), Al-Hashr ('The Gathering') closing with the beautiful names of God, Al-Mumtahana, As-Saff, Al-Jumua ('Friday') on the congregational prayer, Al-Munafiqun ('The Hypocrites'), At-Taghabun, At-Talaq and At-Tahrim.

Qaf, opening the long run of short, rhythmic Meccan surahs that continues through the rest of the Quran, is traditionally reported to have been the surah the Prophet regularly recited at the Friday and festival prayers, a liturgical use later jurists cite as sunna independent of the surah's content. Ar-Rahman's structure, built around the repeated refrain 'which of your Lord's favours will you both deny,' addressed grammatically to two listeners at once, jinn and humankind together, is read by classical commentators as making the surah a direct address to both kinds of creation rather than to humanity alone.

Juz 28 opens exactly where Al-Hadid ends and closes exactly where At-Tahrim does, carrying nine complete surahs in unbroken sequence between those two points, Al-Mujadila, Al-Hashr, Al-Mumtahana, As-Saff, Al-Jumua, Al-Munafiqun, At-Taghabun, At-Talaq and At-Tahrim, twenty-two, twenty-four, thirteen, fourteen, eleven, eleven, eighteen, twelve and twelve verses respectively, both of its own boundaries falling exactly on a surah's beginning and ending.

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