Juz 6

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-Nisa 4:148 through Al-Maida 5:81. It includes the Quranic statement that Jesus was not crucified but raised to God (4:157-158), then opens Al-Maida ('The Table') with the fulfilment of covenants, the rules of lawful food and ritual purity (wudu), and reminders drawn from the histories of earlier communities.

The Quranic account that Jesus was not killed but 'raised up' to God, 'and it was made to appear so to them' (4:157-158), read here, is one of the sharpest points of textual divergence between the Quran and the New Testament's crucifixion narratives, and Islamic exegesis has never settled on a single account of the mechanics involved, with substitution theories, in which another figure was made to resemble Jesus, being widespread but not universally held even among classical commentators. Al-Maida's opening on lawful food and ritual purification (wudu, 5:6) is regularly read as one of the Quran's most legally dense single passages, cited directly in later fiqh manuals on ablution.

Juz 6 finishes An-Nisa's final twenty-nine verses before opening Al-Maida and carrying most of it, verses 1 to 81 of Al-Maida's one hundred and twenty, so roughly three-quarters of this juz belongs to a single surah. The boundary falls inside Al-Maida's material on lawful food and covenant faithfulness, well before the surah's own close.

In communities that pace the nightly tarawih prayers of Ramadan at one juz per night, this is customarily the sixth 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, since these evenly sized units make a consistent daily review schedule possible regardless of where a surah boundary falls. 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 the finer hizb and quarter-hizb marks placed within the text itself to guide reciters mid-portion. Some Mushaf editions additionally shade or border the margin differently for each hizb, so a reciter can judge progress through the juz at a glance without counting verses.