Mona Siddiqui's third lecture of her Humanitas Visiting Professorship in Women's Rights at the University of Cambridge, March 2014. strategicdialogue.org/humanitas Conversations about women and gender related issues have become mainly about rights and justice. Diverse feminist perspectives highlight the reality of women's lives in many parts of the Islamic world and either critique patriarchal structures or explain Qur'anic verses according to 7th century contexts. Yet, this socio-historical emphasis has almost eclipsed the variety of images of the feminine which are also to be found in Islamic thought, literature and poetry. Is the reality of women's lives somewhere between both struggle and ideals, the feminine and the feminist? * Humanitas is a series of Visiting Professorships at Oxford and Cambridge designed to bring leading academics, practitioners and scholars to both universities to address major themes in the arts, social sciences and humanities. Created by Lord Weidenfeld, the programme is managed and funded by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and co-ordinated in Cambridge by the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) and in Oxford by the Humanities Division.

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