Monday 11 August 2008

PhD certificate of New Iran Interior Minister

Recently Iranian Parliament voted for suggested candidate for Interior Minister by President Ahmadinejad. Alef News Agency has initiated a hot debate about the validity of Mr. Ali Kordan PhD certificate from the University of Oxford. You can also see here this unusual certificate. I quote the idea of one of my English friend about this PhD certificate.



"...OK, regarding your query on that certificate - I see that somebody has already pointed out the unusual (i.e. incorrect) spacing between some of the words and the (in their opinion) incorrect use of commas throughout the document. I agree with the correction of "intitle" (it should be "entitle") and that its positioning is odd. In my opinion, there should be a comma after "Bryant" in that first paragraph, though it seems to me that the first paragraph does not read correctly anyway. If it was written: "According to the suggestion and the attestation of Professor Bryant, a faculty of the college of law of Oxford University..." it would not make sense anyway, as it implies that Professor Bryant IS a faculty of the college, while in fact he is a MEMBER of the faculty. In short, it all seems a bit of a mess.
Having said that, I have never seen a PhD certificate from the University of Oxford and I can imagine that it is possible that there are some unusual conventions (!) and it is not impossible that there might be archaic spellings and other random irregularities!! So I would not be able to claim that this is a fake, but it certainly looks suspicious.
I can't understand why they didn't just edit a scanned certificate of copy of a certificate in Photoshop - this would have been a whole lot more convincing!"