Laureation address: Professor Carole Hillenbrand CBE BA MA PHD FBA FRSE FRAS

Honorary Degree of Doctor of Letters
Laureation by Bishop Wardlaw Professor John Hudson FBA, School of History

Thursday 16 June 2022

Chancellor, it is my privilege to present for the degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa, Professor Carole Hillenbrand.

Carole Hillenbrand is among the foremost scholars of the medieval Islamic world, with seminal contributions to our understanding of Muslim perspectives on the Crusades as well as to the public understanding of Islam. 

Carole’s studies started in a rather different area. Her first degree was at Cambridge in Modern and Medieval Languages. She was the first student there to study Romanian and was a particular enthusiast for medieval French. After graduation, her language skills were in much demand, and she spent two years in the Ministry of Aviation. 

Carole’s move to Middle Eastern studies, she describes as a fluke, but a very romantic one. At a party she noticed a man with piercing blue eyes. They did not speak but the man obviously noticed her too, and he asked the hostess for Carole’s telephone number. He duly phoned her and asked her to give up her job and visit Turkey – and that was her future husband Robert, now another renowned medievalist (who I am pleased to say joins us here today). Following their trip to Eastern Turkey, they both applied to Oxford. Carole visited Somerville College and asked the Principal whether she would be allowed to do Arabic. The Principal had lived in Baghdad for nine years and said she would be delighted at last to have a student doing Arabic. Further languages were added – Turkish, and then Persian, developed during a year in Iran with Robert.

Carole then moved to Edinburgh, gaining a PhD in 1979, and being appointed Lecturer and then Reader in Arabic, before becoming Professor of Islamic History in 2000. Her retirement in 2008 turned out to be St Andrews gain, as she spent what she describes as eight very enjoyable years attached to this University as Professorial Fellow in Islamic History, from 2013 to 2021. She lectured to first years and to postgraduates and taught two Honours courses, one enticingly entitled ‘The Assassins’.

Carole’s numerous and widely translated books include The Crusades: Islamic perspectives published in 1999 and Islam: A new historical introduction, published in 2015. Her honours are equally numerous. In 2005 she was the first non-Muslim and first woman to win the King Faisal International Prize in Islamic Studies. In 2007 she was elected Fellow of the British Academy, in 2012 Corresponding Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America. And in 2018 she was made Commander of the British Empire (CBE), for Enhancing Inter-faith Understanding. 

Carole’s generosity to others is immense. I remember a delightful afternoon at her house when she provided help to a young scholar suddenly confronted with doing research on the Islamic conduct of war. Carole then entertained that scholar’s ten-month old baby with equal enthusiasm and expressed disappointment only when we had to leave before the carefully chilled bottle of wine could be removed from the fridge.

Chancellor, in recognition of her outstanding academic career and her contributions to the field of Middle Eastern Studies, I invite you to confer the degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa, on Professor Carole Hillenbrand.