Abstract: Given the number and variety of methods used forhandwriting recognition, it has been shown that there is no singlemethod that can be called the ``best''. In recent years, the combinationof different classifiers and the use of contextual information havebecome major areas of interest in improving recognition results. Thispaper addresses a case study on the combination of multiple classifiersand the integration of syntactic level information for the recognitionof handwritten Arabic literal amounts. To the best of our knowledge,this is the first time either of these methods has been applied toArabic word recognition. Using three individual classifiers with highlevel global features, we performed word recognition experiments. Aparallel combination method was tested for all possible configurationcases of the three chosen classifiers. A syntactic analyzer makes afinal decision on the candidate words generated by the bestconfiguration scheme. The effectiveness of contextual knowledgeintegration in our application is confirmed by the obtained results.