In GNOME when you select certain Arabic fonts, the characters do not display. This problem appears when you select fonts for applications, the desktop, or the window title using the GNOME font properties menu. The affected fonts include:
Akhbar MT (Regular, Bold)
Shayyal MT (Regular, Bold)
Naskh MT (Regular, Bold)
No error message is displayed.
Workaround:
Use any of the newly delivered Kacst family of fonts to display Arabic characters in GNOME applications.