Arabic Letter Teh Initial Form

Read it as Arabic ت at the start of a connected word.

This is a positional shape, not a separate letter or special message. It joins the letter that follows; Arabic text shaping chooses the displayed form according to neighboring letters. The base letter ت has two dots above its shared skeleton with ب and ث, which have different sounds and identities.

Arabic writing developed through cursive Nabataean, a descendant of Aramaic. Inscriptions from the first century BCE and papyrus documents from the first century CE show stages of that ancestor script. By the 7th and 8th centuries, scribes used consonant dots and vowel marks to make writing easier to read, though early Qur'an manuscripts did not use them uniformly.

How do I type Arabic initial teh?

Type ت; the text shaper supplies the initial form.

The initial appearance comes from the letter's position in a word, not a separate keystroke. FE97 is a compatibility character for older encodings, not the usual form for Arabic text. Compatibility normalization can turn it into ت; text shaping can then display the initial form again when its neighbors call for it.