The Uighur Language and People
Numbering 7 or 8 millions, Uighurs are a Muslim Turkic people living primarily in Xinjiang, the westernmost province of the People's Republic of China. As far as I know, they and their Kazak and Kirghiz cousins in China, are the only Turkic peoples still writing in some kind of Arabic script. It's possible Afghan Uzbeks still use it, but I don't think Uzbek is used as a written language in Afghanistan.
The Turks abandoned the Ottomanised Perso-Arabic alphabet in the 1920s in favour of the Latin script. The Soviets imposed an adaptation of the Cyrillic alphabet on the Turkic peoples of Central Asia (Uzbeks, Kazaks, Kirghiz, Turkmens).
The Uighurs too had been forced by the Chinese government to use a Romanised alphabet. But the Arabic alphabet was restored to them in 1986, albeit after Chinese Turcologists had touched it up. They hacked away at the numerous redundant Arabic letters and imported the Ottoman Turkish system of representing vowels. The result, thanks ironically to the Chinese oppressors, is that the Uighurs have got what is probably the most logical and best adapted version of the Arabic script among any peoples.
In Arabic, only long vowels have letters of their own, and these letters must do triple duty as consonants and diphthongs. But the Arabic alphabet is very well suited to the consonant-rich Arabic language. When Persians and Indians adopted the Arabic script, they more or less kept the original vowel system in tact. Yet since Indo-European languages have a much richer vowel system than Arabic, the inadequate Arabic system of vowel representation placed new untold burdens on the few letters which were used for vowels. All the same, in any language using the Arabic script, the way a word is written does not represent all the sounds contained in that word.
Except Uighur -- the most radical innovation found in the Uighur Arabic script is the representation of all the vowel sounds of the language, short and long. I'd even argue that Uighur has got one of the best writing systems in the world, in terms of adaptation to the language. For every letter represents a unique and distinct sound of the language, without redundant or silent or ghostly or chameleonic letters at all. It's hard to misspell in Uighur. This is nothing like Persian, Pashto or Urdu!