Seems like the coins written in arabic are the most difficult to identiy. Having no knowledge of the Arabic language, I can only guess and search various countries. I've tried many of the ones I could think of, but none seem to show this man facing left with some kind of special hat on. I'm sure he's a leader of the country, and appears to be an older gentleman. It appears to be a mosque on the reverse. It has reeded edges and seems to be made of brass. Please help if you can....Thanks, Bill
Pakistan 1 rupee http://www.humsafar.info/currency_coins.php There's a number of ways to go about this. You could get an Arabic alphabet from Wikipedia or from a Arabic language tutoring website and then look for the letters you can find to piece together as much as you can. (Arabic has the same thing we do, though, where in cursive, capital R is not the same as little r and for little r the shape is different at the start or middle of a word. But you can work through that or ignore it.) You could guess. There's like only 30 Muslim/Arabic nations in the world and common things are common. So, if you found this, it had to come from like one of the top 10 most likely. Then you google for "coins of Jordan" and "coins of Syria" and so on. I started with them because Muslims are usually pretty serious about religion and there is a thing in the Ten Commandments against graven images because this coin has a man and a mosque and the man would be a graven image of false worship. So, this had to come from someplace with strong ties to the West. The present Queen of Jordan Rania al Yassin has a college degree in business and work experience with Apple -- you don't get that with the Saudis, right? Their royal women are still locked up. So, just to say, this coin must have come from some "arabic" place with strong westernism. And the Pakistanis are not Arabs. So, there is that. Also, it is a modern coin. So you can search the central banks of the countries to see their current coins. I mean, it takes work, but I did it because it was fun for me.
No, the Pakistanis are not arabs, and I don't believe I intimated that they were. The writing on the coin appears to be arabic or a derivitive, and I find that I'm not the only one to be confused by this. Most of your suggestions would not have helped identify this coin anyway. After much additional research, I have identified the coin as a 2005 1 Rupee coin from Pakistan. Since the language of Pakistan is Urdu, I'm assuming this coin is written in this language which is very similar, at least in appearance (to a Westerner), to Arabic.
Read carefully. If you had followed the link I provided at the top, you would have seen your coin, from 2001. A Pakistani 1 rupee. All I was doing was showing you how I figured it out without knowing. I thought it through. I looked for westernized "arabic" countries. And the third try, Pakistan, was a hit. I mentioned that the Pakistanis are not Arabs only to underscore that this coin would come from a cultural periphery of that context, which it does. Yes, Urdu is written in Arabic letters, as are other languages such as Farsi of Iran. Nonetheless, if you wanted to go that route, the Arabic alphabet is available online and you could have pieced it together that way. Although I have had one class in that language, I took an easier route. There are many ways to identify coins and paper money. It's pretty easy once you do a few.
mmarotta, sorry I misunderstood your intentions. I also failed to see the link at the beginning of your reply. Again, sorry about that. Actually, I did as you suggested and started searching the various "current" coins and came across a picture that looked like the obverse. From there it was simple to identify it....Thanks for the reply.
