---
title: Do Not Use Obliques in Arabic
teaser: 'The history of obliques/italic fonts, and why you shouldn''t use them in
  Arabic-based texts.

  '
tags: typography,design,arabic
author: Rami Taibah
published_on: 2022-11-01
---

![Y No Use Italics in
Arabic](https://images.thoughtbot.com/blog-vellum-image-uploads/ViAVbbUQtDelxmi7smww_y-u-no-italics.png)

A few years back, I had a conversation with [Dr. Nadine
Chahine](https://arabictype.com), I asked her about oblique (italic) fonts and
their use in Arabic, and why many Arabic fonts don't provide italic formats. She
explained that historically speaking, latin fonts had different styles such as
Roman, Italic, and Black Letter. At some point, the Italic font became a
secondary font to support other primary fonts used for emphasis, titles, and
bibliography among other uses. With time, the slanted style of the Italic font
was subsumed by primary fonts and oblique styles were developed for most latin
fonts.

Arabic typographic tradition has similar cross-font connections but with
different goals. For example, the
[Naskh](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naskh_(script))/[Thuluth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thuluth)
or
[Rayhani](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayhani_script)/[Muhaqqaq](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhaqqaq)
connections, which are body/headline connections. The Arabic language's
tradition however, does not have a body/body-emphasis connection like with the
latin language.

Thus, obliques are a special latin calligraphic style that got imported into the
typographic and technology worlds. Importing the idea of obliques wholesale into
Arabic brushes off the nuanced details of Arabic typography causing more
problems that it would solve.

Should we slant right or left? Naskh font slants a few degrees left, while Kufic
Ma'il slants right; which one should we force against its tradition? If we force
Kufic Ma'il to the left, the letters *baa* & *jeem* will look all too similar.
These questions and many others need to be resolved before adapting oblique
fonts to signify emphasis.

Dr. Chahine suggests dropping the whole slanted direction and adapt other
practical methods. She suggests mixing fonts where one font is a primary font
and the other an emphasis font. Similar to the original genesis of italics. For
example mixing [Ruq'ah](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruq%CA%BFah_script) with
Naskh.

![Emphasis in Arabic using a different font vs.
italics](https://images.thoughtbot.com/blog-vellum-image-uploads/tqceJeayQRmi8amiYGFD_arabic-ruqaa-vs-italic-emphasis.png)

Another direction is using different font weights. Typographers could put more
effort into creating different fonts e.g thin, regular, medium, bold, and black.
Dropping the whole obliques design efforts once and for all.

![Emphasis in Arabic using bold vs.
italics](https://images.thoughtbot.com/blog-vellum-image-uploads/U6nbO2IzTu6oN4yPkbQZ_arabic-emphasised-with-different-weights.png)

---

This blogpost was originally [posted](https://rtaibah.com/2022/10/03/do-not-use-oblique-fonts-for-emphasis-in-arabic/) in Rami's personal blog.