Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Arabic script is the writing system used for Arabic and for many other languages of Asia and Africa, including Persian, Urdu, Uyghur, Kurdish, Pashto, Sindhi, Malay written as Jawi, Somali, and Mandinka. It was first used to write Arabic, most notably the Quran, the holy book of Islam.
The Arabic script is the second-most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world, after the Latin script. It is also second by the number of countries that use it, and third by the number of users, after the Latin and Chinese scripts.
The Arabic alphabet is derived either from the Nabataean alphabet or, less widely believed, directly from the Syriac alphabet, both of which descend from the Aramaic alphabet, which in turn came from the Phoenician script. The Nabataean form developed from a cursive Aramaic style written on papyrus, founded by northern Arab tribes who built a kingdom centred around Petra in Jordan in the 6th and 5th centuries BCE.
The Arabic script is called an abjad because in most cases its letters transcribe consonants, or consonants with only a few vowels, leaving the reader to supply the rest. When used for languages such as Serbo-Croatian, Sorani, Kashmiri, Mandarin Chinese, and Uyghur, vowels become mandatory, so the script also works as a true alphabet.
Turkey changed to the Latin alphabet in 1928, a reform declared by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk as part of an internal Westernizing revolution. The earlier Arabic-script form is now known as Ottoman Turkish and is held by many to be a separate language because of its high percentage of Persian and Arabic loanwords.
Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan are the main non-Arabic speaking states using the Arabic alphabet for official national languages such as Persian, Pashto, Urdu, Sindhi, Kashmiri, and Punjabi. Regions of India and China also use it, for Kashmiri and Urdu in India and for Uyghur in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.