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 Az-Zumar 39:32 through Fussilat 41:46. It contains the celebrated verse of hope, 'do not despair of the mercy of God' (39:53). Ghafir ('The Forgiver') preserves the plea of the believing man in Pharaoh's court, and Fussilat ('Explained in Detail') answers the Meccans who turned away from the revelation.

Ya-Sin's closing argument, that the God who first created the human from nothing can surely restore even scattered bones and dust (36:78-79), is frequently cited in later Islamic theology as a concise summary of the Quran's whole case for bodily resurrection, restated in different imagery across many surahs but rarely as compactly as here. As-Saffat's account of Abraham's readiness to sacrifice his son, unnamed in the Quranic text itself though widely identified in later tradition as Ishmael rather than Isaac, a point of clear divergence from the Genesis account naming Isaac, underlies the ritual sacrifice still performed at Eid al-Adha.