Leitner's life extraordinaire | The Express Tribune
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By Afrasiab Mehdi Hashmi Qureshi | PUBLISHED July 16, 2023 ISLAMABAD: Dr Gottlieb Wilhelm (William) Leitner was a man of exceptional talent. A multilinguist and an educationist par excellence, who understood the cobwebs of theological discipline, he was also the Founding Principal of Government College University Lahore. Born in a Jewish family in Budapest in 1841, Leitner proceeded to Constantinople, where he mastered Turkish and Arabic, when he was only 10 years old. Later, at 15, Leitner was appointed interpreter to the British Commissariat during the Crimean War, at the rank of a colonel. In 1859, Leitner became a lecturer in Arabic, Turkish and Modern Greek at the King’s College, London, where two years later at 23, he served as Professor of Arabic and Mohammedan Law. (Jewish Encyclopedia). After the 1857 War of Independence, the British wanted to promote Western education, especially in the north-western parts of the subcontinent. They decided to