Juz Amma surahs: all 37 in order, and the order to memorize them in

What is Juz Amma?

Juz Amma is the 30th and final part of the Quran, running from Surah An-Naba to Surah An-Nas, and named after amma, the first word of its first verse.

The Quran is divided into 30 parts of roughly equal length, each called a juz, so that it can be read over a month or memorized in measured steps. Juz Amma is the one most people meet first, because its surahs are short and complete. By the figures in Tanzil’s published metadata, it holds 37 of the Quran’s 114 surahs and 564 of its 6,236 verses: about a third of the surahs, but roughly a tenth of the verses, which is our own arithmetic.

Notice the verse column. Juz 28 and Juz 29 fill exactly the same number of pages, yet one has 137 verses and the other 431, because verses in the later surahs are much shorter. For anyone planning memorization, pages are a fairer measure of effort than verse counts, and the same holds inside Juz Amma: its 564 verses are short, so 23 pages hold four times as many verses as Juz 28 does in 20.

What are the 37 surahs of Juz Amma, in order?

The 37 surahs of Juz Amma, in mushaf order, run from An-Naba (78) to An-Nas (114); the table gives each surah’s number, its verse count and the page where it starts.

Page numbers refer to the widely printed 604-page Madinah mushaf, and verse counts follow the Kufan numbering used in most printed copies; both come from Tanzil’s metadata. Where two surahs start on the same page, the second begins partway down it.

Three patterns in the list matter for planning. The first three surahs, An-Naba, An-Naziat and Abasa, are the longest in the part, with 128 verses between them by our count. The last eighteen surahs, from Al-Qadr to An-Nas, have between 3 and 11 verses each. And the final page, 604, holds three complete surahs, which is why a child can finish Al-Ikhlas, Al-Falaq and An-Nas from a single page.

English spellings of the surah names vary between books and apps (Naba or Nabaa, Kawthar or Kauthar), so a child may meet several forms. The Arabic names and numbers are fixed, and the number is the safest way to find a surah in any mushaf or app.

Why do children memorize Juz Amma backwards?

Children memorize Juz Amma backwards because the shortest surahs are at its end: starting from An-Nas gives complete surahs of 3 to 6 verses, while starting from An-Naba means 40 verses at once.

The printed order of the Quran is not arranged by length within this part, and the first surah a child opens to is one of the longest. A seven-year-old who spends two months on An-Naba and has still not finished it learns that memorizing is something he fails at. A seven-year-old who finishes An-Nas in a week, then Al-Falaq, then Al-Ikhlas, learns the opposite, and that feeling carries him into the longer surahs later.

There is a second, practical reason. Many families already recite the last few surahs aloud at home, so a child has often heard them before the first lesson, and memorizing becomes a matter of fixing words he half-knows rather than learning new ones from nothing. Working backwards uses that head start; working forwards wastes it.

Working backwards is a teaching choice, not a rule about the Quran. Whether there is any preference in recitation or prayer for one order over another is a matter for scholars, and this article does not go into it. Once the whole part is memorized, revising it in mushaf order, from An-Naba to An-Nas, is a good way to make sure the surahs are held in sequence.

How the first months of lessons are organised for a child, and what to ask a school before starting, are covered in online Quran classes for kids. Our one-to-one course for children, which starts with the short surahs of Juz Amma, is on Quran classes for kids and teens.

What order should a child memorize Juz Amma in?

A workable order is four stages, from An-Nas back to An-Naba, each longer than the last: 32 verses, then 79, then 194, then 259, by our own arithmetic on Tanzil’s verse counts.

Each stage is a block of consecutive surahs, so a child always memorizes the surah just before the one he has finished, and revision can run through each block in order. The verse totals are sums we made from the list above; the stage boundaries are our own teaching guidance rather than a fixed curriculum.

Stage 1 is mostly about building the habit: seven surahs in 32 verses, several of which the child may already know by ear. Stage 2 doubles the load but keeps every surah at 11 verses or fewer. Stage 3 is where the jump happens, with Al-Fajr at 30 verses and several surahs near 20, and a child who has rushed the first two stages usually stalls here. Stage 4 holds the eight longest surahs, and by then the child has memorized 29 surahs and knows how he learns.

Inside a long surah, the same idea applies on a smaller scale. A teacher splits a surah of 40 verses into short runs the child can hold, adds one run at a time, and joins it to the earlier runs before moving on. The surah is only “done” when the child can recite all of it in one go.

How long does it take to memorize Juz Amma?

Memorizing Juz Amma takes as long as its 564 verses divided by the weekly portion, plus revision weeks; at 10 new verses a week, the arithmetic gives about 57 weeks.

We keep no record of how long our own students take to finish the part, and we do not publish an average, because a number built from no data would only be marketing. What we can give is arithmetic. The table divides 564 verses by a steady weekly portion and rounds up; it assumes no weeks off, no weeks spent only on revision, and that the portion holds steady as the surahs get longer, none of which is quite true.

Two corrections make the table more realistic. Weekly portions usually grow: a child who manages 3 verses a week in stage 1 may manage 10 or more by stage 3, once the habit is set. And revision weeks, when nothing new is added, slow the total, though they are what keeps the part memorized. A family that chooses a portion it can keep in its busiest week will usually finish sooner than one that chooses an ambitious portion and stops.

The bigger risk is not slowness but uneven speed. A child who moves quickly through stages 1 and 2 without revising them often has to relearn them in stage 3, which costs more weeks than steady progress would have.

How do you stop a child forgetting Juz Amma?

A child keeps Juz Amma by revising old surahs in short, spaced sessions, and by not starting a new surah until the last one can be recited twice in a row without help.

Forgetting is normal, not a failure. A meta-analysis by Cepeda and colleagues (2006) gathered 839 assessments from 317 experiments and found that spreading study over separate sessions improves retention compared with massing it together, and that the best gap between sessions grows as the period you need to remember grows. The review covers verbal recall tasks in general, such as word lists, not Quran memorization specifically, so it supports the principle rather than any particular schedule.

The schedule is our own guidance, built on the spacing principle rather than tested against an alternative. The rule that matters most sits above it: when an old surah starts to slip, pause new memorization for a week and rebuild it. Building on a surah that has started to slip doubles the work later.

Signs that the portion is too large are usually visible before the forgetting is: mixing up the endings of two neighbouring surahs, needing a prompt in a surah that was secure a month ago, or rushing through a recitation to get it over with. Each is a reason to reduce the new portion, not to stop. How lessons and home practice fit together over a whole hifz programme is set out in Quran memorization online.

What comes after Juz Amma?

After Juz Amma, most learners move to Juz 29, known as Juz Tabarak: 11 surahs from Al-Mulk to Al-Mursalat, with 431 verses on 20 pages of the Madinah mushaf.

Juz Tabarak is the natural next step because it continues backwards through the mushaf from where Juz Amma began, but it changes the work. Its shortest surah, Al-Muzzammil, has 20 verses, and its longest, Al-Muddaththir, has 56, so there are no three-verse surahs to finish in a week. A child who found stage 4 of Juz Amma manageable is usually ready; a child who struggled with An-Naba may need more time on revision first.

The right moment to move on is not a date but a test: the child can recite each stage of Juz Amma in order with few prompts, and reads new verses from the page rather than only by ear. A learner still decoding letter by letter gains more from finishing the reading foundations, set out in how to read Arabic, than from starting a harder part early.