I see the same problem with Hebrew words (in maps within Israel).
I'm quite sure that this bug is a left-to-right vs. right-to-left issue, which is why both Arabic and Hebrew behave the same.
Arabic words have the additional bug that none of the letters connect, though most of them should (like in cursive English writing). This require a few variants of each letter, which is a feature that also seems to be broken in the current mapping deployment.