Arabic is a unique script in a world that's moving towards rigid glyphs in computerized communication. It represents a large population spread around the planet, so it's not likely to be buried. The calligraphic nature of Arabic makes it extremely difficult to represent effectively, although a range of groups from DecoType in Europe (website not up yet) to the American University of Beirut have put a great deal of work and effort into the problem.
MicroSoft has moved recently to include parts of the Unicode Consortium's Arabic characters into their fonts (along with Japanese kana, Thai, Cyrillic, Greek and Hebrew). If you're looking for these fonts, I'd recommend checking checking Unicode Fonts for Windows.
There's not much consistency in Arabic fonts. TraditionalArabic-Bold is good; it's got more characters than MicroSoft, and they're named similar to the Unicode convention. Naqsh is a wonderful excercise in fulfilling the Unicode Arabic Extensions and in many ways a beautiful font; it also appears to be Unicode-compliant. Nesf is more elegant than Naqsh, but includes far fewer charactrs. So far, Arial, Tahoma and Times New Roman appear to be the best from MicroSoft itself; they actually have upwards of 200 Arabic characters and they even have Unicode numbers, although they were originally named according to the now-defunct AFII standard (whose website).
Why am I whinging about this? Unlike Chinese, Japanese and Korean, most languages don't play well with Adobe's CID-Keyed font functionality. For printed documents, we find ourselves still having to re-encode fonts for PostScript output, or call by glyphname in Java. It would be good to have an Arabic naming convention, just like we have for western European fonts.
