My understanding is the main difference between Hindi and Urdu is that Hindi is in Devanagari script and Urdu is in a modified form of Arabic Script, and they can understand each others spoken language with ease, whereas Moroccans and Iraqis cannot understand each other at all. Why is this?
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Politics. The boundaries between languages can be fuzzy and are often defined by political rather than linguistic factors. Treating Moroccan and Iraqi Arabic as merely different dialects of a common language ties in to political ideologies like Pan-Arabism and Arab nationalism, it encourages a sense of shared identity across the Arab world (or conversely the sense of shared identity encourages the view that Arabic is a single language), whereas the longstanding hostile relationship between India and Pakistan encourages the two to differentiate themselves from each other and treat Hindi and Urdu as distinct languages. The Balkanisation of, uh, the Balkans after the breakup of Yugoslavia led to a similar situation with Serbian, Croatian, Montenigrin, and Bosnian, which could be considered different registers of a common language but have historically been treated as being separate languages.
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