خالد حسني أَنَا الّذِي نَظَرَ الأَعْمَى إِلَى أَدَبِي وَأَسْمَعَتْ كَلِمَاتِي مَنْ بِهِ صَمَمُ

I was trying to figure how to list fonts accessible to GTK (or pango actually), it turned out that pango.Context has a list_families() method that returns a tuple of pango.FontFamily objects.
Some thing like this:

window = gtk.Window()
context = window.get_pango_context()
families = context.list_families()

for i in families:
        print i.get_name()

Update: I rewrote this port and changed its title from Pango vs. FriBiDi, as people misunderstood my point.

We have at least two free software libraries that are capable of doing Arabic shaping, Pango and the FriBiDi (fribidi-0.19 only).

Smart fonts are fonts that is accompanied by instructions that define how glyphs are selected to be laid out, in contrast dumb fonts does not contain such instructions and the text is laid out by simple character to glyph mapping.

WebKit-r29336 using Pango for font rendering, enabling Arabic and other complex text rendering.

How beautiful is that!