SDL_TTF didn't have support for Arabic until a few years ago. Thus, we included libraqm to help with proper text display.
However, since a few years back, SDL_TTF has gained support for Arabic text shaping, see libsdl-org/SDL_ttf#66 (comment)
We should check the commits made by us on our SDL_TTF submodule, see if they're still needed and then maybe rebase them against latest SDL_ttf 2.0 upstream.
libsdl-org/SDL_ttf#66 (comment) mentions the steps required for getting Arabic to work.
We also need to make sure that SDL_TTF is compiled with harfbuzz support.