To clarify a few things, because it will help you along in the future as well.
txt = u'Arabic (\u0627\u0644\u0637\u064a\u0631\u0627\u0646)'
This is not an Arabic string. This is a unicode object, with unicode codepoints. If you were to simply print it, and if your terminal supports Arabic you would get output like this:
>>> txt = u'Arabic (\u0627\u0644\u0637\u064a\u0631\u0627\u0646)'
>>> print(txt)
Arabic (الطيران)
Now, to get the same output like Arabic (الطيران) in your database, you need to encode the string.
Encoding is taking these code points; and converting them to bytes so that computers know what to do with them.
So the most common encoding is utf-8, because it supports all the characters of English, plus a lot of other languages (including Arabic). There are others too, for example, windows-1256 also supports Arabic. There are some that don't have references for those numbers (called code points), and when you try to encode, you'll get an error like this:
>>> print(txt.encode('latin-1'))
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeEncodeError: 'latin-1' codec can't encode characters in position 8-14: ordinal not in range(256)
What that is telling you is that some number in the unicode object does not exist in the table latin-1, so the program doesn't know how to convert it to bytes.
Computers store bytes. So when storing or transmitting information you need to always encode/decode it correctly.
This encode/decode step is sometimes called the unicode sandwich - everything outside is bytes, everything inside is unicode.
With that out of the way, you need to encode the data correctly before you send it to your database; to do that, encode it:
q = u"""
INSERT INTO
tab1(id, username, text, created_at)
VALUES (%s, %s, %s, %s)"""
conn = MySQLdb.connect(host="localhost",
user='root',
password='',
db='',
charset='utf8',
init_command='SET NAMES UTF8')
cur = conn.cursor()
cur.execute(q, (id.encode('utf-8'),
user_name.encode('utf-8'),
text.encode('utf-8'), date))
To confirm that it is being inserted correctly, make sure you are using mysql from a terminal or application that supports Arabic; otherwise - even if its inserted correctly, when it is displayed by your program - you will see garbage characters.
