GoKawiilNasri Khattar's Unified Arabic simplifies script to 30 letterforms
In 1932, Lebanese architect Nasri Khattar stumbled upon a way to simplify Arabic script while substituting for a typing instructor at the American University of Beirut. He discovered that using a single initial letterform instead of the correct medial one kept text legible, inspiring him to develop Unified Arabic, a system reducing Arabic's many positional and ligature variants down to 30 consistent letterforms.