Emily Jane O’Dell is resident fellow in Islamic Law in the Abdallah S. Kamel Center for the Study of Islamic Law and Civilization at Yale Law School and an editor of SHARIAsource at Harvard Law School. She spent over half a decade teaching in the Middle East at the American University of Beirut as the Whittlesey Chair of History and Archaeology and at Sultan Qaboos University in the Sultanate of Oman. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Salon, NPR, Al Jazeera, Christian Science Monitor, and The Huffington Post. She also blogs about her travels on her website.