Malti-Douglas grew up in Deir el-Qamar, where her father was a physician.^[3] Her primary education took place at French Catholic boarding schools and at age 12, she emigrated to the United States.^[3] She learned to become fluent in English and when she attended Cornell University, she started taking Semitic languages.^[3] Malti-Douglas attended the University of California, Los Angeles and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales where she did her graduate work in Arabic.^[3]

Malti-Douglas received a 1997 Kuwait Prize for Arts and Letters and earned the Distinguished Scholar Award from the Dean of Women's Affairs at Indiana University Bloomington in 1998.^[4] In 2004, she was inducted into the American Philosophical Society.^[4] Malti-Douglas was awarded a National Humanities Medal in 2015.^[5]

Malti-Douglas is a professor emeritus at Indiana University Bloomington and the Martha C. Kraft Professor of Humanities in the College of Arts and Sciences.^[4]

Malti-Douglas studied Muslim literary texts from medieval to modern times and wrote about her findings in Woman's Body, Woman's Word: Gender and Discourse in Arabo-Islamic Writing (1991).^[6] She describes how women's bodies are increasingly seen as a threat in this literature.^[6] Malti-Douglas wrote the second English language examination of the work of Nawal El Saadawi in 1995.^[7] The work, Men Women and God(s): Nawal El Saadawi and Arab Feminist Poetics is a "penetrating and admiring analysis of El Saadawi's writing," according to Library Journal.^[7] Men, Women and God(s) is also about showing that El Saadawi's work is literature, not just "polemics," as it is often labeled.^[8]

In The Starr Report Disrobed (2000), Malti-Douglas deconstructs the issues surrounding the Bill Clinton sex scandal from a feminist perspective.^[9] The California Law Review called The Starr Report Disrobed an "insightful and peppy book."^[10] The journal also felt that the book highlighted another issue: legal document are no longer just for lawyers and jurists, but have become "salable media content and, ultimately, popular cultural artifacts."^[10] The New York Times writes that Malti-Douglas deals with the differences between the facts in the case and the conclusions drawn by prosecutor, Kenneth Starr.^[11]

In Medicines of the Soul: Female Bodies and Sacred Geographies in a Transnational Islam (2001), Malti-Douglas gives an analysis of three autobiographies belonging to Muslim women who became more religious.^[12] Each of the women she studies have rejected the ideas of the "secular West."^[13] Her book examines how men impact and guide the daily lives and even spiritual dreams of Muslim women.^[12]

In 2008, Malti-Douglas edited the comprehensive reference book, The Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender, which cover topics about sex and gender through the fields of psychology, sociology, biology, religion and history.^[14] Booklist wrote that "Bringing together a remarkable array of material, this set, which appears to be without competition, will no doubt succeed in providing information but also in creating dialogue around issues of sex and gender.^[15]