Juz 21

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-Ankabut 29:46 through Al-Ahzab 33:30. It carries Ar-Rum ('The Romans') with its prophecy of Byzantine victory, Luqman with the sage's counsel to his son, As-Sajda ('The Prostration'), and the opening of Al-Ahzab ('The Confederates') on the Battle of the Trench.

Al-Qasas's account of the infant Moses set adrift on the Nile and raised in Pharaoh's own household draws on the same core narrative told more briefly in Exodus, and classical Islamic exegesis, working without direct access to the Hebrew text, developed its own distinct set of supplementary details, the names given to Pharaoh's wife and to Moses's sister, for instance, through hadith and early commentary rather than through the biblical account itself. Al-Ankabut's image of the idolaters' false protectors as flimsy as a spider's web (29:41) is one of several Quranic passages later Islamic natural-history and proverb literature returned to repeatedly as an example of argument built directly from an everyday observed phenomenon.

Juz 21 carries an unusually large number of complete surahs for a single division: after finishing Al-Ankabut's last twenty-four verses, it carries three complete surahs in sequence, all sixty verses of Ar-Rum, all thirty-four verses of Luqman and all thirty verses of As-Sajda, before opening Al-Ahzab and stopping less than halfway through its seventy-three verses.

In communities that pace the nightly tarawih prayers of Ramadan at one juz per night, this is customarily the twenty-first 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, a page-level convention distinct from these finer internal marks. 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.