Juz 22

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-Ahzab 33:31 through Ya-Sin 36:27. The rest of Al-Ahzab addresses the households of the Prophet, the ordinance of modest dress, and the description of Muhammad as the 'seal of the prophets.' Saba ('Sheba') and Fatir ('Originator') follow, leading into Ya-Sin.

Ar-Rum's prophecy that the defeated Byzantines ('the Romans') would be victorious again within a few years (30:2-4) is one of the few Quranic passages tied to a specific, externally datable historical event, the Byzantine Empire's wars against Sasanian Persia in the early seventh century CE, and classical commentators report that companions of the Prophet made wagers on the prophecy's fulfilment, a tradition later cited as evidence of the verse's predictive character. Luqman, read just after, preserves the counsel of a wise, non-prophetic figure to his son, and whether Luqman was a prophet, a sage, or a legendary wise man of pre-Islamic Arabia was already a matter of disagreement among the earliest commentators.

Juz 22 finishes Al-Ahzab's last forty-three verses, then carries two complete surahs, all fifty-four verses of Saba and all forty-five verses of Fatir, before opening Ya-Sin, a surah widely called the heart of the Quran in later devotional tradition, and carrying only its first twenty-seven of eighty-three verses. Ya-Sin itself is left unfinished at the juz boundary, continuing into the next portion.

In communities that pace the nightly tarawih prayers of Ramadan at one juz per night, this is customarily the twenty-second 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. 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.