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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The distinction between “language” and “dialect” is often more cultural than scientific. The famous quote (from Yiddish, which was itself often minimized as a language) was “a language is a dialect with an army and navy.”
In this case, there’s a lot of social and cultural pressure to consider Arabic one language. It is the language of an ethnic group and a religion. While people vary a lot culturally from Morocco to Iraq, they typically share a faith and some cultural identity, with pride in reading the Quran in the same language. Besides, everyone can understand Egyptian movies.
Hindi and Urdu, on the other hand, have undergone significant cultural pressures to diverge and be considered differently, particularly in the 20th century as a result of the effects of British rule and partition. People who speak Hindi and Urdu are fairly likely to have cultural differences/conflict, particularly on opposite sides of the Pakistan/India border.
A striking example of this same dynamic happened in the Balkans, where 50 years ago everyone would have agreed that the language was Serbo-Croatian and everyone spoke it with minor regional variations. After a decade of brutal ethnic and religious conflict and Yugoslavia breaking up into component nations, people are more likely to speak of Bosnian, Montenegrin, Serbian, or Croatian; linguists would still consider them varieties of one language. Whether Mandarin/Cantonese/others are truly dialects of Chinese or separate languages is another interesting and politicized question.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_secessionism
EDIT: A particularly weird situation arose after the Soviet Union annexed the region of Moldavia (then part of Romania) during WWII, what’s now Moldova. The local language had been variously referred to as Romanian or Moldovan for centuries and a Romanian speaker from Bucharest would have zero issues with understanding it, though it was written in the Cyrillic alphabet until the 19th century. The Soviet authorities, wanting to enforce separation, insisted on calling it Moldovan and writing it in Cyrillic only. Since the fall of communism, it’s switched back to the Latin alphabet and is variably called Moldovan or Romanian.
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