I'm not an Arabic speaker, but I can read and understand Arabic to some extent.
There are many non-religious (and even non-muslim) Arabic speakers, many people who have learned Arabic, and many Muslim Arab speakers who are interested in magic, so it's simply incorrect to conflate Arabic with Islam or to claim that the reason the Arabic hypothesis hasn't gotten attention is because "Muslims don't want to study magic." There's almost 500 million Arabic speakers worldwide. And in fact, the Arabic hypothesis has gotten considerable attention, it's probably one of the most studied hypotheses, and it hasn't gotten anywhere substantive as far as I know.
Aside from superficial similarities I don't really see any plausibility that Voynichese is Arabic, or Arabic encoded with a European alphabet, until there's decent evidence to the contrary. The superficial similarities that are interesting are e.g. labelese often beginning with o, like otalar, similar to Arabic ال and ا.
But the structure of Voynichese is incredibly different. Arabic is an abjad, where word morphology consists of various permutations of typically 3 core consonants defining each semantic concept. There is no such structure in Voynichese. But even more fundamentally, basic things like the number of characters and character-level entropy seem quite different.
If one were to claim that Voynichese is related to Arabic, one would have to describe the generation process by which Arabic becomes Voynichese, and this process can't be a simple substitution cipher, it would have to be very sophisticated. I'm not aware of any such generation process that actually works with real Arabic sentences and produces valid Voynichese.
There are many non-religious (and even non-muslim) Arabic speakers, many people who have learned Arabic, and many Muslim Arab speakers who are interested in magic, so it's simply incorrect to conflate Arabic with Islam or to claim that the reason the Arabic hypothesis hasn't gotten attention is because "Muslims don't want to study magic." There's almost 500 million Arabic speakers worldwide. And in fact, the Arabic hypothesis has gotten considerable attention, it's probably one of the most studied hypotheses, and it hasn't gotten anywhere substantive as far as I know.
Aside from superficial similarities I don't really see any plausibility that Voynichese is Arabic, or Arabic encoded with a European alphabet, until there's decent evidence to the contrary. The superficial similarities that are interesting are e.g. labelese often beginning with o, like otalar, similar to Arabic ال and ا.
But the structure of Voynichese is incredibly different. Arabic is an abjad, where word morphology consists of various permutations of typically 3 core consonants defining each semantic concept. There is no such structure in Voynichese. But even more fundamentally, basic things like the number of characters and character-level entropy seem quite different.
If one were to claim that Voynichese is related to Arabic, one would have to describe the generation process by which Arabic becomes Voynichese, and this process can't be a simple substitution cipher, it would have to be very sophisticated. I'm not aware of any such generation process that actually works with real Arabic sentences and produces valid Voynichese.