Ondine comes to my mind, but it may not be what you’re looking for.

- Lex

Papyrus.

Ha! Just kidding.

No, seriously.

Anyway, most typefaces that “mimic” foreign characters end up looking really cheesy and many times are a condescending stereotype. Your closest bet is to go with a decent script face, since most handwriting even across cultures tends to certain similarities, yet can get as wild and foreign as you want.

Myfonts.com has a sale on a script typeface called Majidah that sounds like it might fit your bill.

FontFont has FF Falafel (as well as the Hebrew version, FF Bagel):
http://www.fontfont.com/shop/

I admit they are slightly cheesy (pun inevitable), but can be used effectively. Most of these type of faces are used for menus anyway, so we thought we might as well reflect that in the choice of names. All other names that came up tended to be racist or dangerously political.

I always thought that despite its name, Park Avenue Script appeared to be full of Eastern promise...

Rooster has a Khayyam revival that sounds like what you’re looking for. On the same spread in the Solo book is also Civilite, which is of course based on a French rather than Arabic model, but has the curvaceous scriptiness without the cheesy stereotype.

In a similar vein is Legende and its derivatives, including Caliph. There are a couple others on the Solo page, like “Timbuctu” and “Persian,” but they’re even cheesier than Falafel, so I wouldn’t bother trying to track down digital versions.

See also Persia by Masoud Nejabati. That is among the many dozen links to be found on Luc Devroye’s Arab Simulation page.

What about Elsner+Flake’s Petras Script! It is loveley, pretty legible, and has a gentle arabic inflection too.

Don’t forget Linotype’s Pide Nashi.

Phil Grimshaw’s Braganza I reckon

p22 mystic

haha! funny Dan Gayle :D I need a downloadable font i can use for my identity project. i’m student and can’t afford to buy just yet. will do one day though :D something like:
http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/linotype/pide-nashi/
http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/pixymbols/faux-arabic/

If you want to be subtle, go with a reverse-contrast face, like FF-Balance.

hhp

Some students can... some can’t.

None of the above-mentioned fonts looks like Arabic. More surprising is that even if you arrange the very Arabic letters side by side, they won’t look Arabic. That’s why even well-educated Arabs fail to read Arabic Crosswords at the first glance!

See what happens to my name when Across-crossworded.
And it becomes much harder to read when down-crossworded.

Seems like an appropriate discussion to plunk the Emirates logo into, since I saw this recently and have been trying to identify the typeface:

http://www.ekgroup.com/AnnualReports/

Funny I recently had to find a font just like this - and I think my colleagues here more or less covered it.

http://www.arabictype.com/blog/

NeueB,

The Emirates font and logo were custom-designed for The Emirates Group; the font is called EK. They use it through-out their websites and other corporate communications. It was designed by or for their in-house communications team in the late ’90s (look here: http://www.sheikhmohammed.co.ae/Spanish/news/newsdetails.asp?NType=S&New...), and is a full-fledged font, but is not available to the public.

hey! That’s where all our money goes!

No, to cluster bombs and depleted uranium ammo.

hhp

Actually, I found my font that I was looking for. Thanks all.

can you please post the name of the font you found missgiggles? thanks