1. A computer-implemented method for retrieval of Arabic historical manuscripts, comprising the steps of: entering Arabic historical manuscript images into a computer for processing; extracting circular polar grid features from the Arabic historical manuscript images stored in the computer; constructing a Latent Semantic Index based on the extracted circular polar grid features, the Latent Semantic Index having a reduced dimension m×n Term-by-Document matrix obtained from a Singular Value Decomposition of a higher dimensional Term-by-Document matrix constructed by the computer from the extracted circular polar grid features, wherein m rows represent the features and n columns represent the images; accepting a user query against the stored Arabic historical manuscript images, the computer forming the user query as a query vector derived from features extraction of a query image supplied by the user; performing query matching based on comparison between the query vector and the Term-by-Document matrix; and displaying Arabic historical document images returned by the query matching process performed by the computer, the returned document images being ranked by similarity to the user query according to a predetermined distance measurement between the query vector and the Term-by-Document matrix.