SMITH, WILFRED CANTWELL. Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1916–2000) was a historian of religion, a comparative theologian, and an ordained minister of the United Church of Canada. In 1949 Smith founded the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University in Montreal, where he matched Muslim and Christian appointments. He later succeeded R. L. Slater as director of the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University (1964–1985), quitting Harvard for Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, to dissociate himself from U.S. militarism during the Vietnam War years. While at Harvard, Smith coordinated the university's first undergraduate concentration in religious studies.

After majoring in oriental languages at the University of Toronto, Smith studied theology under H. H. Farmer and Islamics under H. A. R. Gibb in Great Britain. In 1941 he joined the faculty of Forman Christian College in Lahore (in present-day Pakistan), then a center of multireligious...