How long does it take to memorise Juzʾ ʿAmma?
The honest answer is “it depends on your pace”, which is true and not much help. So here is the arithmetic, and then the one thing about Juzʾ ʿAmma that changes how you should plan it.
What you are memorising
| Juzʾ ʿAmma | |
|---|---|
| Sūras | 37 (an-Nabaʾ to an-Nās, 78–114) |
| Āyāt | 564 |
| Pages | 23 (pages 582–604 of the standard 604-page Madani muṣḥaf) |
| Share of the Qur’an | About 3% of the text |
The last row is not the 9% most trackers will tell you, and we have written about why.
The arithmetic
Pages are the most useful unit, because they are what you actually see when you sit down with a muṣḥaf. At a steady pace of new material:
| New material a day | Days of new memorising |
|---|---|
| A fifth of a page | about 115 |
| A third of a page | about 69 |
| Half a page | about 46 |
| A full page | 23 |
Those are days of new memorising, and they are the smaller half of the job. What you memorised last week has to be kept, and the Prophet ﷺ was plain about how quickly it goes:
“Keep on reciting this Qur’an, for by the One in Whose Hand my soul is, the Qur’an slips away from memory faster than camels escaping their tying ropes.”
So build revision into the calendar from the first week rather than saving it for the end. If you keep one day a week for review only, add a sixth to the numbers above.
Where the time actually goes
Most people memorise Juzʾ ʿAmma backwards, starting from an-Nās, because the sūras at the end are the short ones. That is a good order. But it hides something that catches people out halfway through.
Measured by the length of the Arabic text, here is how much of the juzʾ you have covered as you work backwards:
| Memorised from an-Nās back to | Sūras | Share of the juzʾ |
|---|---|---|
| an-Naṣr (110) | 5 | 3.7% |
| al-Fīl (105) | 10 | 8.1% |
| al-ʿĀdiyāt (100) | 15 | 14.8% |
| aḍ-Ḍuḥā (93) | 22 | 29.2% |
| al-Aʿlā (87) | 28 | 51.3% |
| al-Muṭaffifīn (83) | 32 | 70.7% |
| ʿAbasa (80) | 35 | 84.2% |
| an-Nabaʾ (78) | 37 | 100% |
By the time you reach aḍ-Ḍuḥā you have memorised 22 of the 37 sūras, which feels like more than half, and you have covered less than a third of the text. The last three you reach, an-Nabaʾ, an-Nāziʿāt and ʿAbasa, are more than a fifth of the juzʾ between them.
None of this is a reason to change the order. It is a reason to plan by text rather than by sūras, so that the second half does not feel like failing when it is only longer. If your tracker counts sūras or verses, the first weeks will flatter you and the last ones will not. The same mismatch is why the sūra with the fewest verses is not always the shortest to learn.
A plan that holds up
- Pick a pace you can keep on your worst day, not your best one. Five lines done every day beats a page done when you feel like it.
- Listen before you memorise. Hear each āyah from a reciter a few times before you repeat it, so the sound you are memorising is the right one.
- Recite it in your prayers. What you memorised this week is what you recite after al-Fātiḥa, which is revision you were going to do anyway.
- Keep the meaning beside the words. A short tafsir on each āyah makes it easier to remember and better to recite.
We built the memorisation tracker in DeenDrops around exactly this: it weighs progress by the length of the text, and the reader repeats an āyah as many times as you set, slowed down if you need it. But a notebook and a pencil will do the same job if you measure by pages.
And do not rush past the point of it. Abu ʿAbd ar-Raḥmān as-Sulamī reported:
“Those who used to recite the Qur’an to us from among the Prophet’s Companions related to us that they would listen to ten verses from the Prophet (may Allah’s peace and blessings be upon him) and not move to the next ten verses until they learned the knowledge and application contained therein. They said: So, we learned knowledge and application.”