Rub el Hizb

The divisions are later than the text. The early copies known as the Uthmani mushafs had no divisions into portions, and no dots or vowel marks; the scholar az-Zarqani wrote that people later divided the Qur’an into thirty parts, some divided each part into two hizbs, and some divided each hizb into four quarters. As IslamQA explains, this was a matter of scholarly judgement (ijtihad), so scholars could divide the text differently. No one knows for certain who began it. Some scholars name al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf, in Iraq, who had the Qur’an divided by counting its letters. Ibn Taymiyya recorded that the practice spread from Iraq, though the people of Medina did not know it, and he preferred the older way of the Companions of the Prophet, who divided the Qur’an by its surahs: a division by letters can stop a reader partway through a phrase.