A Thirtieth of the Recitation Cycle

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-Anfal 8:41 through At-Tawba 9:92. The close of Al-Anfal and the opening of At-Tawba ('Repentance') address the dissolving of treaties with the polytheists, the expedition of Tabuk, and the exposure of the hypocrites. At-Tawba is the only surah that does not begin with the Bismillah.

At-Tawba is the one surah in the Quran that does not open with the invocatory Bismillah, and the classical explanation, reported from Uthman himself in response to a question from Ibn Abbas, holds that the Prophet died without clarifying whether At-Tawba was a separate surah or a continuation of the preceding Al-Anfal, since the two shared closely similar subject matter and were sometimes called 'the paired ones'; on that uncertainty the compilers left no Bismillah between them. A later, more homiletic explanation, that the formula of mercy was withheld because the surah addresses treaty-breaking idolaters, is widely repeated in popular teaching but is not attributed to any authentic hadith from the Prophet.