Arabic manuscripts represent a rich source of knowledge that has been highly underutilized. Huge repositories of historical artifacts are yet to be typeset and published in book-form. Given vast content of these manuscripts, it is important to develop indexing systems that support contentbased retrieval from historical manuscripts. In this paper, we propose a computer aided retrieval and indexing system for Arabic historical manuscripts. The proposed system extracts meaningful information (features) that is used in indexing. Some preprocessing steps are also implemented in order to enhance the quality of document images. More than one form of a similarity measure has been tested. The developed prototype system has shown encouraging results with respect to the word matching rates achieved.