We propose a novel algorithm for the segmentation and pre-recognition of off-line handwritten Arabic text. Our character segmentation method over-segments each word, then removes extra breakpoints using knowledge of letter shapes. On a test set of 200 images, 92.3% of the segmentation points were detected correctly, with 5.1% instances of over-segmentation. The pre-recognition component annotates each detected letter with shape information, to be used for recognition in future work.