Nasri Khattar and Unified Arabic

Nasri Khattar (1911-1998) was a Lebanese architect and type designer best known for developing Unified Arabic (al-huruf al-muwahhada), a simplified system of Arabic letterforms intended to make the script easier to read, print, and type. Trained as an architect at Yale University, Khattar’s modernist sensibility and emphasis on reduction, function, and efficiency would leave their mark on his approach to type design.

He was born in Antelias, Lebanon, and grew up in the Quaker community of Broumana as one of five brothers. This upbringing was shaped by simplicity, discipline, and social services, values that later became central to his work. At the age of 13, a sort of child prodigy, he graduated from Broumana Friends High School in 1924. In 1930, he graduated from the American University of Beirut with a bachelor's in business administration.

The idea for Unified Arabic began in 1932 when Khattar replaced a professor who taught basic Arabic typing skills at the American University of Beirut. While typing the phrase ahlan wa sahlan أهلاً وسهلاً (welcome in Arabic), he accidentally used the initial heh in place of the medial one and quickly noticed that it was still legible despite the error. From then on, he embarked on a lifetime quest of reducing the number of Arabic letter variations to make mechanical reproduction easier.

Arabic is a cursive script where letters change shape according to their position in the word. More than half of the 29 letters have four basic shapes: initial, medial, final, and isolated, while the rest have final and isolated forms. With contextual alternates, required ligatures, script grammar rules, and vocalization marks, the number of glyphs can easily reach 150, making Arabic typesetting and typing complex. Early movable-type cases could require as many as 500 characters per font, roughly eight times the size of a Latin set. This made it difficult to fit Arabic on typewriters where the number of letter variants was too large for the available keys and too expensive for mechanical typesetting.

As such, Unified Arabic is a set of 30 letterforms: one form for each Arabic letter, plus the hamza and lam alef. By April 1934, Khattar had completed his first set of Unified Arabic letters and later filed for a patent in 1947. Khattar worked through a reductive design process, distilling the hundreds of variant shapes into their most characteristic forms. Preserving legibility, he produced countless sketches in order to find the most characteristic form of each Arabic letter. He also acknowledged the influence of Latin type forms and proportions on his letterforms and argued that the advantages of the Roman alphabet were not because of its inherent superiority but from its "printability."

Recognizing the potential of the project, Khattar was appointed by IBM in 1947 as “Ambassador” to the court of Farouk of Egypt. The appointment was made in collaboration with the literacy campaign led by Dr. Frank Laubach, an internationally known educator and founder of the Foundation for the Teaching of Illiterates (World Literacy Committee). Khattar travelled to Egypt with six brand new IBM Electric Typewriters carrying Unified Arabic letters along with fully vocalized printed specimens of Al-Fatiha of the Holy Koran. These typewriters were the first commercial application of Unified Arabic.

Believing that Unified Arabic could dramatically reduce the time needed to teach reading, Laubach wrote to Khattar in one of his letters:

That same year, Khattar submitted his Unified Arabic proposal to the Academy of the Arabic Language in Cairo, which was searching for ways to reform the Arabic writing system since 1932. Although his first proposal was rejected, a later submission with a broader repertoire of Unified Arabic typefaces was considered as one of three finalists out of the 266 proposals submitted.

In 1957, Khattar received support from the Ford Foundation which led to the official establishment of the Unified Arabic Alphabet Foundation (UAAF). Basing himself in Beirut, Khattar promoted UA through exhibitions, educational booklets, metal type, printed specimens, and a short promotional film titled "Mr. Diehard Accepts Progress" using marionettes to market the UA concept.

Khattar’s typefaces can be grouped into three main categories: Unified Detached, Unified Attached, and Simplified Naskh. The first category was the most reduced form of his Unified Arabic idea, using detached letters with no ligatures and a limited character set of 30 letters. The second introduced some connected forms and ligatures to make the letters more familiar to Arabic readers. It is worth noting that Khattar first designed the connected form called neo-kufic. It holds the first patent where the letters are unified and connected. The third remained closer to traditional Arabic, but with a reduced number of glyphs, around 60 to 65 characters, and was developed for practical uses such as typewriters and newspapers

Across these categories, his experiments extended across several media and formats. He designed typefaces that were cast in metal, adapted for typewriters and phototypesetting machines, and produced in three-dimensional form for signage and game boards. He also developed educational material for children, linking his typographic project directly to literacy and learning.

Despite the support of IBM, the Ford Foundation, patents, copyrights, prototype products, and endorsements from people in linguistics, education, and literature, Unified Arabic was not widely adopted. Rapid technological advances also changed the conditions that had made Unified Arabic present itself as a potential solution. As Linotype machines, phototypesetting, and later digital publishing systems developed, they became increasingly capable of handling Arabic’s large character set and cursive nature.

In 1986, Rev. Dennis Hilgendorg and Dr. Ben Wood, Director of Educational Research at Columbia University, nominated Nasri Khattar for the Nobel Peace Prize for his life’s visionary achievements and their vast implications in the fields of linguistics, literacy, and printing. It is important to note that Khattar’s project was shaped by the Arab postcolonial search for modernity and by the belief that the Arabic script could be rethought in relation to education, technology, and mass communication. Unified Arabic remains a controversial idea worth revisiting, especially in relation to literacy and Arabic type design.

In 2013, UA Neo B and UA Neo N, digital versions of UA Beiruti and UA Neo Naskhi, were released by 29LT foundry. This revival gives educators and designers the opportunity to explore the use of unified detached Arabic typefaces in contemporary digital contexts.

Written By: Yara Khoury Nammour

Yara Khoury Nammour is an award-winning Lebanese graphic designer, educator, and leading scholar in Arabic typography and bilingual design systems. An Assistant Professor at the American University of Beirut (AUB), she holds a master's degree from Middlesex University and spent two decades as Design Director at Al Mohtaraf, where she crafted custom typefaces and major cultural publications. Her notable contributions include authoring Nasri Khattar: A Modernist Typotect, co-organizing the regional Mashq Conference, and being selected as the 2025 Hoffmitz Milken Center for Typography Resident, where she developed digital systems to map rhythmic patterns in Arabic script.

More from Yara Khoury

To watch:

• Letterform Frequencies: Reading Arabic by Numbers, Hoffmitz Milken Center for Typography (HMCT), 2025 — Here
• An Arabic Type Research Center in the Making: A Pragmatic Approach, 2025 — Here

To read:

• Nasri Khattar, A Modernist Typotect — Here