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A Thirtieth of the Recitation Cycle

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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-Araf 7:88 through Al-Anfal 8:40. It carries the confrontation of Moses with Pharaoh, the plagues and the golden calf, then Al-Anfal ('The Spoils'), revealed around the Battle of Badr, on the ethics of war, the distribution of gains and trust in God.

Al-Anfal, revealed around the Battle of Badr in 2 AH, the first major military engagement of the early Muslim community, addresses in this juz the distribution of captured wealth among the fighters, a subject on which later Islamic legal schools built detailed and sometimes divergent rules for the treatment of spoils in warfare more generally. Moses's confrontation with Pharaoh in Al-Araf, read alongside it, is one of several extended Mosaic narratives that scholars of the Quran's internal chronology use to trace how the same core story is told with different emphases depending on the surah's date and audience.

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