It is 2pm, and a seven-year-old boy sits in an after-school Urdu remedial class, his fingers tracing the unfamiliar curves of the words before him. The sentence on the page seems simple enough: “Yeh ...

Sitting in my university office in Paris, I was recently visited by a young French student wishing to learn the Urdu script. He had traveled to Turkey to study Indian Sufism, and his teachers had told ...