Putting a unicode string on an ImageDraw canvas

People are telling me that PIL supports unicode strings, does it? And if
yes, why does the following not work:

import ImageFont, Image, ImageDraw
s = u'\u0623\u0636\u0641'
im = Image.new('RGB', (200,200))
draw = ImageDraw.Draw(im)
draw.text((40,40), s) #fails

It results in the following exception:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "buffer.py", line 9, in <module>
    draw.text((40,40), s) #fails
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/PIL/ImageDraw.py", line 267, in
text
    mask = font.getmask(text, self.fontmode)
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 0-2:
ordinal not in range(128)

So how, do I put this unicode string on the canvas?

Thanks in advance, Thomas

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