Christopher Ferrard

graduated from Edinburgh University with an MA in Turkish in 1976. He completed a PhD thesis entitled Ottoman Contributions to Islamic Rhetoric in 1979. He has been working in business in Edinburgh ever since but still finds time to write articles on a variety of subjects mainly to do with the Ottomans.

Articles

Turkish language reform: The Scottish connection

At a time when anti-Ottoman bigotry abounded, the Scotsman Elias John Wilkinson Gibb was a sympathetic interpreter of Islam to the Christian West. What struck Gibb, with his “Scottish democratic intellect”, was how distant written Ottoman Turkish was from the spoken language.

Read in Journals