 <p>As in the comment: it is not <em>UTF8</em>, it is <em>WINDOWS-1256</em> encoding, so you can repair it on Linux using <code>iconv</code> command for file <code>test</code>: </p> <pre><code>jh@jh-aspire:4804~$ iconv -fwindows-1256 -tutf8 test هاـالحجرنالرفاعيمني </code></pre> <p>(I have no idea what it means as I don't know Arabic)</p>