Abstract : In this paper we present a novel approach for the recognition of offline Arabic handwritten text that is motivated by the Arabic letters' conditional joining rules. A lexicon of Arabic words can be expressed in terms of a new alphabet of PAWs (Part of Arabic Word). PAWs can be expressed in terms of letters. The recognition problem is decomposed into two problems that are solved simultaneously. To find the best matching word for an input image, a Two-Tier Beam search is performed. In Tier one the search is constrained by a letter to PAW lexicon. In Tier two, the search is constrained by a PAW to word lexicon. Directing the searches is a Neural Net based PAW recognizer. Experiments conducted on the standard IFN/ENIT database  of handwritten Tunisian town names show word error rates of about 11%. This result is comparable to the results of the commonly used HMM based approaches.