 After his thesis was rejected by the University of Cambridge, 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 Doctor of Philosophy degree 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.