Arabic characters not showing properly in MySQL

My install of FrontAccounting is working correctly from a Arabic language perspective - at least when viewing in FA and generating PDF reports.

I am running with an English user interface but want (and can) enter Arabic characters. They appear correctly on subsequent access to the same pages - for example looking at Customer Name and Address fields they appear correct. The problem is that when looking at these fields in MySQL using Workbench, the Arabic characters are not Arabic characters at all! I want to access these fields with some PHP/MySQL pages that I am writing but the data is all wrong for the Arabic characters (but correct for the English characters).

Example: In FA, the Address field for a customer reads >> Greenridge Drive ﻹاه س هس سخةثفاهىل
But in MySQL, the content of the address field reads >> Greenridge Drive ﻹاه س هس سخةثفاهىل

Does the fact that Arabic is a R to L language have anything to do with this?

I am running Linux Ubuntu.
My file at ../lang/installed_languages.inc  includes the following:
$installed_languages = array (
  0 =>
  array (
    'code' => 'C',
    'name' => 'English',
    'encoding' => 'utf-8',
  ),

The MySQL database is running InnoDB and I am using utf8 - default collation

Can someone tell me how to have the correct Arabic characters show in MySQL?

Thanks Ray