DISCLAIMER: this is just my opinion man. also if what i say here is obvious to you/think "it goes without saying" then good for you i guess? im trying to put my thoughts somewhere
tbh i have a lot of opinions on typography and lettering that is currently in fashion, but if we've hung out irl, you probably know what my opinions are. so instead im going to talk about why i like arabic typography: literally no rules. and i mean that not in the lets go buck wild way, but more like, there is no modern typographical movement so you can draw from whatever influences you want, and it shouldn't feel like its out of place/culturally irrelevant (or if this movement exists i suck at finding it and it would genuinely mean the world to me if you can share it with me, you can be smug about it too if you want). NEW LINE: a found a few modern attempts at this. but the main difficulty is how many different letter forms and how difficult it is to kern more traditional arabic lettering. there are solid attempts at this and one cool thing i saw is that they are trying to make a cohesive typeface with both arabic and latin glyphs. the point is that you would be able to put both next to each other and they would look synnergistic, like on signs and other bilingual settings. DONT EVER TRY TO MAKE ONE OF THESE FONTS BY YOURSELF, YOU WILL DIE.
but before i tell you why i like it, ill tell you why i hate it :3c
honestly my general problem a lot of new arabic "typohraphy" and "lettering" is the same as the larger problem with arabic art in general, in that its either religious in nature, or just an appropriation of "western" styles. like, there is no thought being put into how to evolve the medium naturally. your only options as an arabic artist are: take existing aesthetics and window dress them with arabic, or stay stuck in the past and do more of the same (nostalgia baiting for one of the islamic empires). i think it would be rude to commemorate my hate for some person's art here, so i won't.
on a more positive note, the reason i like it is that there is a lot less rules than with the latin alphabet. while there are basics like: writing is right --> left, there is a "line" that the text needs to follow so you can understand whats being written, but there is a lot less restrictions (less rigid base line, mean line, cap height...etc) that you need to follow for legibility's sake. so you can do really cool display fonts and more ornamental lettering in architecture and as decorations.
a thing that enables you to be more ornate and still maintain some legibility, in actuallity, arabic letters are comprised of a few very simple shapes that repeat heavily between different letters (honestly the only way making any arabic font is even remotely possible). you can really see that in this chart:
so if you see a little loop with two dots ontop you immediately recognize it as /q/ and not a /f/ or /m/, but they can all look similar to have more cohesion artistically, or simplify the glyphs due to limitations (e.g. tiling with geometric kufic). honestly i'jam was a really good invention, cuz otherwise it would've been even harder to read... fun fact, for most secular writing we don't have the vowels on there and you're supposed to figure it out based on context (arabic grammer is very formulaic so its very possible to do), but imagine if you only vaguely knew what the consonants were...
there are a few things that let arabic get away with not being forced to have a rigid line structures to maintain legibility, main one being the fact that the letters are connected together (for the most part). you can see that for most letters, when you write them in a word together, they are attached to each other, example, the two words: delicious date (the fruit) تمر لذيذ
i mean there are spaces within the word sometimes, like the "delicious" and thats where spaces come to play i guess, but most of the time, the letter forms themselves define "the line" and you can use that to break the line and establish the reading blocks the way you want, you can a lot more (or a lot less) verticality to your script :>
i make stuff from time to time, you can take a look here