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-Anbiya 21:1 through Al-Hajj 22:78. Al-Anbiya ('The Prophets') is a rapid gallery of earlier messengers testifying to one message, and Al-Hajj ('The Pilgrimage') sets out the rites of the Kaaba and the sacrifice, and contains the verse permitting the wronged to fight in self-defence.

Al-Anbiya moves rapidly through a roll call of earlier messengers, treating them as a single continuous testimony to one message rather than as separate stories, a compressed narrative style scholars of the Quran's internal chronology generally associate with its later Meccan surahs, when repetition of a single prophetic pattern across many names had itself become an established rhetorical device. Al-Hajj, opening the second half of this juz, sets out the rites of pilgrimage to the Kaaba, and its verse permitting those who have been wronged to take up arms in self-defence (22:39) is widely identified by classical commentators as among the earliest verses in the Quran to sanction fighting at all, marking a shift from the exclusively non-violent posture of the Meccan period.