For those of you who regularly write Arabic (and, incidentally, you can generalize this to any language inshallah), you might look at your writing and say, “man, that is ugggggleeeeeee!”
So how do you go about beautifying it? The key here is that you can recognize nice Arabic writing when you see it–and I don’t mean calligraphy.
The solution is surprisingly simple. Grab a mushaf (or, if you have them, one of the three Medinah University Arabic books), Apply your observational skills, and you can easily inshallah detect a few clues on how to improve (or even how to write them!) Check out the letters below:
What are some lessons we can learn from these few letters–noon, dhal, and alif?
- The noon is not symmetrical–rather, the right side is taller then the left! (You can see this more in the Medinah books inshallah.)
- Harakaat are slanted–not flat horizontal, as I first thought.
- Dhal has a straight back–it doesn’t start out curved.
- Dhal and alif are the same height–meaning your dhals should fill the line from top to bottom, if you write on ruled paper.
Allah knows best, you can find more yourself with a bit of effort. Look at the letter itself–how did they write it? Where did they start? How does it look in relation to other letters?
And of course, unless you write regularly (even once a week is good), none of this will benefit you too much. Wallahu ‘alim.