That may be the case. Also, some Arabic users prefer English in terminal anyway. This topic comes to mind.
That was useful input. gnome-terminal has also other issues with non-latin scripts, e.g. some Indian scripts.
Ok. Still some progress (i.e. it works without binding="strong" for sans-serif).
As a last attempt I uploaded a new variant to the PPA where I added back the monospace section including binding="strong" for monospace only. Any chance you can install that variant and see if it helps wrt gnome-terminal?
(If you haven’t yet got permission to post here, please feel free to send me an email to gunnarhj@ubuntu.com.)