Mona Siddiqui, Elif Safak, Razia Iqbal: 'Feminism, Religion and Women's Rights'

Part one of the concluding symposium of Mona Siddiqui's Humanitas Visiting Professorship in Women's Rights at the University of Cambridge, March 2014.
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In the first session, chaired by Dr Jude Brown (Director of Gender Studies at the University of Cambridge), Turkish author Elif Şafak and BBC special correspondent Razia Iqbal engaged Professor Siddiqui and the audience with a discussion on Belonging and Identity: What role do art and literature play for redefining women's rights? They examined the role that literature plays in giving readers and authors the power of imagining spaces for women in society and the what role the arts can play in transcending political and social rifts in countries like Turkey and Britain.
The second session, The Ground of Encounter: Focusing on women's rights would allow fresh thinking about the kind of society we want to live in, was chaired by Professor Jeremy Sanders (Pro-Vice Chancellor of Institutional Affairs at the University of Cambridge). Professor Ash Amin (Geography, Cambridge) and Iraqi novelist, artist, and political activist Haifa Zangana discussed the importance of finding a middle ground in which people can fully address the rights of women as human rights -- and the increasingly difficulty in finding such a social space.
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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 Research Centre for the Humanities (TORCH).