This paper presents a method for the skew angle estimation of noisy handwritten Arabic documents using an energy distribution of the Cohen's class. The presence of noise in raw document images can create local maxima which can disturb the projection histogram analysis. To avoid this drawback, we propose to apply a Cohen's class distribution on the projection profiles histograms obtained using different projection angles. These distributions reduce the importance of these local maxima and are fitted to the non-stationary nature of the histogram profiles. The orientation of the document is given by the highest maximum. The proposed skew angle estimation technique has been evaluated on 864 skewed documents. The results obtained with 9 selected distributions are presented at the end of this paper.