Wilfred Cantwell Smith

Wilfred Cantwell Smith (July 21, 1916 – February 7, 2000) was a Canadian professor of comparative religion who from 1964–1973 was director of Harvard's Center for the Study of World Religions. The Harvard Gazette said he was one of the field's most influential figures of the past century. In his 1962 work The Meaning and End of Religion he notably and controversially questioned the validity of the concept of religion.

Smith was born in Toronto to parents Victor Arnold Smith and Sarah Cory Cantwell. He was the younger brother of Arnold Smith and the father of Brian Cantwell Smith.

He received a B.A. with honours in oriental languages in 1938 from the University of Toronto. After his thesis was rejected by Cambridge University, supposedly for its Marxist critique of the British Raj, he and his wife Muriel Mackenzie Struthers spent seven years in Pre-Independence India (1940–1946), during which he taught Indian and Islamic history at Forman Christian College in Lahore.

In 1948 he obtained a Ph.D in oriental languages at Princeton University, after which he taught at McGill, founding in 1952 the university's Institute of Islamic Studies. From 1964 to 1973 Smith taught at Harvard Divinity School. He left Harvard for Dalhousie University in Halifax, NS, where he founded the Department of Religion. He was also among the original Editorial Advisors of the scholarly journal Dionysius. In 1978 he returned to Harvard. In 1979 he received an honorary doctorate from Concordia University. After his retirement from teaching, he was appointed a senior research associate in the Faculty of Divinity at Trinity College, University of Toronto, in 1985. He died on February 7, 2000.

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