It depends on the font, of course. Some renditions look like regular Arabic text, others are much narrower: https://fonts.google.com/?preview.text=%EF%B7%BD&script=Arab

It's rendering visibly narrower than the big dash up thread for me, on FF on Android. (Maybe HN's stripping one or more of the combining chars though, so it's not actually showing what you meant in full?)

I fear for the children who had to memorize this.

Just found another way to make my designer panic. We're launching Arabic soon too!