Juz 8

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-Anam 6:111 through Al-Araf 7:87. The rest of Al-Anam argues the case for the one God against idolatry, then Al-Araf ('The Heights') opens with the fall of Adam and the refusal of Iblis, followed by the successive prophets sent to Noah's people, Ad, Thamud and the towns of Lot and Shuayb.

Al-Araf's opening account of Iblis's refusal to bow to Adam (7:11-18), read in this juz, gives one of the fullest Quranic tellings of the episode found more briefly elsewhere in the text, and its insistence that Iblis's fault was pride rather than ignorance became a central theme in later Islamic ethical and mystical writing on the nature of arrogance. The 'towns' of the disobedient peoples that follow, Ad, Thamud, and the towns of Lot and Shuayb, are presented as a repeating pattern rather than isolated stories, a structure of prophet, rejection and destruction that recurs so often across the Quran that classical scholars gave it its own technical name, qasas al-anbiya, the stories of the prophets.

Juz 8 finishes Al-Anam's last fifty-five verses before opening Al-Araf and carrying its first eighty-seven of two hundred and six, well under half. Al-Araf, one of the Quran's longer surahs, will still have well over half its own length remaining to be carried into the following juz, where it finally gives way to Al-Anfal.

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