The Symbols on the Qur'an Page, Explained

You open the mushaf, ready to read, and the page is quietly busy. Tiny letters float above the words. A little star sits in the margin. Somewhere a small م, or a لا, or the word السجدة appears with a line drawn over the text. If nobody has explained these to you, they can feel like a code you were never given the key to, and it is easy to assume everyone else just knows.

They do not just know. Every one of these marks was added by scholars, centuries after the revelation, to help ordinary readers recite correctly. Once you understand what each one is for, the page stops being intimidating and starts being helpful. This guide walks through the marks you will actually meet: the vowel signs inside the line, the juz and hizb markers that tell you where you are, the stop signs, the short pause called a saktah, and the sajdah symbol.

Keep that narration in mind as you learn. Reading the mushaf is a skill, and struggling over it while you learn is itself rewarded. The symbols exist to make the struggle shorter, not to shame anyone who does not yet know them.

Why the page has symbols at all

The earliest copies written in the time of ʿUthman (may Allah be pleased with him) carried the bare skeleton of the text: no dots to tell one letter from another, no vowel marks, and none of the signs we are discussing here. That worked because the first readers were native Arabic speakers who had learned the Qur'an directly, mouth to ear, from the Companions. As Islam spread to people whose first language was not Arabic, scholars added dots and vowel marks so the reading stayed exact. If you want the fuller story of how the written text was safeguarded, see how the Qur'an was preserved.

All of it serves one instruction: recite carefully and with measure, not carelessly or in a rush.

It helps to sort the marks into two families. Inside the line sit the marks that tell you how to sound each word: the short vowels and their companions. In the margin and above the line sit the marks that manage your recitation: where you are in the Qur'an, where to stop, where to pause, and where to prostrate. We will take them in that order.

The marks inside the line: sounding the word

Arabic is written with consonants; the short vowels are added as small marks called harakat. A slanted stroke above a letter is a fatha (an 'a' sound), the same stroke below is a kasra (an 'i' sound), and a small loop above is a damma (a 'u' sound). A small circle above a letter is a sukun, which means the letter carries no vowel and closes the syllable. A shape like a tiny rounded 'w' above a letter is a shadda, and it doubles that letter, so you press on it. If any of this is new, our guide on how to read Arabic starts from the letters themselves.

Two more inside the line are worth naming. When you see two of the same vowel mark stacked at the end of a word, that is tanwin, an 'n' sound added to the ending (pronounced -an, -un or -in). And a small wavy line, the maddah, sitting over an alif tells you to stretch that vowel longer than usual. The length of these stretches is a topic in itself; our guide to the madd rules covers the counts.

Finding your place: juz, hizb and manzil

The Qur'an is one book, but it is divided in several overlapping ways so that a reader can take on a manageable portion. None of these divisions change the text; they are just signposts, usually printed in the margins or the corners of the page.

The most familiar is the juz, called a para in South Asia. There are 30 of them, and their purpose is simple: read one juz a day and you finish the whole Qur'an in a month, which is why the divisions matter so much in Ramadan. Each juz is split in half into a hizb, giving 60 hizbs in total, and each hizb is quartered again. Those quarter points are marked with a striking eight-pointed star, the rubʿ al-hizb, often with the word الربع (the quarter), النصف (the half) or الثلاثة أرباع (three quarters) written beside it so you know which quarter you have reached.

The manzil is the weekly version of the same idea: seven portions, so a reader who wants to complete the Qur'an every week reads one manzil a day. There is a well-known memory aid for where the seven begin, the phrase Fami bishawqin, whose seven letters are the first letters of the surah that opens each portion.

The rukuʿ sign (ع)

If you read from an Indo-Pak style mushaf, you will also see a small ع (the letter ʿayn) in the margin from time to time. It marks the end of a rukuʿ, a short block of related verses, roughly the amount an imam might recite before bowing in prayer. The little numbers around it count the rukuʿ within the surah and within the juz. It is a helpful reading unit, but it is a feature of certain print traditions: you will not find the ʿayn in the standard Madinah mushaf, which uses the juz and hizb marks instead.

The stop signs (waqf marks)

The waqf marks are the ones most readers ask about. Where you stop and where you carry on can change the meaning of what you recite, so scholars developed a set of small symbols to guide the reader to safe stopping places. It is important to know that these signs are not part of the revealed text: they are the considered judgement (ijtihad) of later scholars of recitation, the system most associated with Imam al-Sajawandi. They are guidance, and on some places scholars differed. For the fuller principles of stopping and starting, see our guide on waqf and ibtida.

The strongest of these is the necessary stop, م. When you see it, stop, because reading on would attach words that do not belong together. Its opposite, لا, marks a place where the meaning would be broken if you stopped, so you glide past it. The two 'preference' signs, صلى and قلى, are gentle advice rather than commands: one leans toward continuing, the other toward stopping, and either choice is allowed.

The pause that is not a stop: saktah

There is one more kind of pause that confuses beginners because it looks like stopping but is not. A saktah is a brief silence on a word, held for a moment, without taking a new breath, before you continue. It is usually marked with a small سـ (the letter sin) or the word سكت above the place. In the recitation of Hafs, which is what most of the Muslim world reads, there are four well-known saktahs, and they exist to stop two words from blurring into one and changing the sense.

Take the first one. At the opening of Surah al-Kahf, the word ʿiwaja ('crookedness') ends one thought and qayyima ('straight') begins the next. If a reader ran them together in one breath, the ear could mistake the join. The tiny saktah holds them apart for an instant, and the meaning stays clear. Because a saktah keeps the breath, it is not the same as the stopping signs above; it is its own small instruction.

The sajdah sign

At certain verses, the reader and listener prostrate. These are the verses of sajdat al-tilawah, the prostration of recitation. On the page they are easy to spot: the word السجدة is printed in the margin, and a line is usually drawn above the exact words at which you prostrate, sometimes with a small ornament. When you reach that point in your recitation, you make a single prostration, as you have been taught. One of these verses is a command to do exactly that.

How many sajdah verses are there? Here the mushaf and your teacher matter more than a single number, because the scholars counted either 14 or 15, differing over two places in particular: the verse in Surah Sad (38:24) and the second prostration in Surah al-Hajj (22:77). This is a settled matter within each school of fiqh, not something to resolve here; the reliable route is to follow the marks in your own mushaf and ask your teacher, or read a detailed answer on a trusted site such as islamqa.info.

Putting it together on a real page

None of this needs to be done all at once, and with a little practice your eye learns to take the signs in without thinking. A simple order of attention helps while it is still new.

You do not have to master all of this at once

Seeing every symbol laid out in a list can feel like a lot, but you will never meet them all on one line, and you learn them the way you learn road signs: a few at a time, in context, until they are second nature. The fastest way by far is to read aloud to someone who can catch you the moment you miss a stop or run past a saktah, which is precisely what a good teacher does. If you would like that kind of correction, you can find a Qur'an or Arabic teacher who will read the page with you line by line.