Question: Farsi characters showing as jibberish

Hi, I have created a PHP file, and wrote a string of Farsi letters in it. In the head section of the HTML, I put: <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=UTF-8"> There appears to be something wrong with Apache, or something, because no matter whether I put that string in an echo statement or just in an HTML with a php extention, the page loads as jibberish and I have to set the character encoding to UTF-8 manually in Firefox. Renaming that same file to .htm (when not using the echo statement), and loading it in the browser shows me the correct Farsi characters. Should I change something in Apache's settings for this to work? Thanks!