This paper present a query-by-example word spotting in handwritten Arabic documents, based on Harris detector and Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT), without using any text word or line segmentation approach, because any errors affect to the subsequent word representations. First, the interest points are automatically extracted from the images using Harris detector, then, we use SIFT descriptor to represent each interest point in the images. In the end, we represent the image's regions as histogram by using bag of visual words method. The validate study is conducted under a series of controlled experiments on handwritten Arabic documents images.