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Much work on Arabic language optical character recognition (OCR) has been on Naskh writing style. Nastalique style, used for most of languages using Arabic script across Southern Asia, is much more challenging to process due to its compactness, cursiveness, higher context sensitivity and diagonality. This makes the Nastalique writing more complex with multiple letters horizontally overlapping each other. Due to these reasons, existing methods used for Naskh would not work for Nastalique and therefore most work on Nastalique has used non-segmentation methods. The current paper presents new approach for segmentation-based analysis for Nastalique style. The paper explains the complexity of Nastalique, why Naskh based techniques cannot work for Nastalique, and proposes a segmentation-based method for developing Nastalique OCR, deriving principles and techniques for the pre-processing and recognition. The OCR is developed for Urdu language. The system is optimized using 79,093 instances of 5249 main bodies derived from a corpus of 18 million words, giving recognition accuracy of 97.11 %. The system is then tested on document images of books with 87.44 % main body recognition accuracy. The work is extensible to other languages using Nastalique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper questions the classical concept of metaphor as a mere rhetorical flourish, decorative and individual linguistic unit that can be studied in isolation, separate from the text, context and world of literary works. It also argues against the extreme postmodern reductive view of language that looks at metaphor as an instrument of evasion, suppression and distortion of truth, and contends that metaphor as linguistic configuration can alter, extend, twist and elaborate language to serve ontological, heuristic and cognitive functions. My contention is that metaphors in serious literature address the relationship between language and life. This paper generates an optimistic view of metaphor by interpreting the way metaphors embody and generate new knowledge in the mystical poetry of Bulleh Shah Sahib. This paper will focus on the significance of the metaphor of Alif in Sufi discourse, and then argue for the meaning it generates in one poem by Bulleh Shah Sahib, a Punjabi Sufi poet. Alif as a metaphor acquires additional symbolic meanings and extralinguistic reality by contradicting and violating the referential meaning of Alifas a letter in Perso-Arabic alphabet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article describes the cover page of the April 7, 2010 issue of the publication which shows a page from the Qarmathian Qur'an, completed in the 11th and 12th century in Iran or Afghanistan. According to Islamic belief, the Qur'an was disclosed to Muhammad by the angel Jibril over a period of 23 years, starting from 610 CE. The meaning of the four lines of text depicted in the image is given. A discussion of Arabic writing and of alif, considered the most common letter in Arabic, is also provided.