Chibli Mallat is a lawyer and a law professor. He serves as Presidential Professor of Law and Professor of Law and Politics of the Middle East at the S.J. Quinney School of Law at the University of Utah. He also holds the EU Jean Monnet Chair of European Law at Saint Joseph's University in Lebanon. Professor Mallat has taught law on three continents as: Lecturer in Islamic Law and Director of the Centre for Islamic and Middle Eastern Law at SOAS, University of London; Visiting Professor, and Law and Public Affairs fellow at the Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University; Visiting Professor of Law and Oscar M. Ruebhausen Distinguished Senior Fellow at Yale Law School; and Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques; Visiting Professor of Islamic Legal Studies at Harvard Law School. A prolific author in Arabic, English, and French, he is Chairman of Right to Nonviolence, a Middle East-based NGO active in the fields covered by this book. Amongst his publications are Introduction to Middle Eastern Law (Oxford, 2007), The Renewal of Islamic Law (Cambridge, 1993), The Middle East into the 21st Century (Reading, 1996), Democracy in America (in Arabic, Nahar, Beirut 2001),and Iraq: Guide to Law and Policy (Boston 2009).