Heir Jordan
Harper's Bazaar; New York; Jun 2000; 160-163, 180
Jan Goodwin;

FACING THE NATION
Queen Rania is renowned for her beauty, elegance, and intelligence-and for her determination to overthrow Jordan's status quo.

ROYAL CRUSH
Rania, who frequently travels throughout the country to meet her subjects, greets teachers and-tudents in a Karak district school.

The world's youngest queen is a Palestinian in an ethnically divided country, a modern woman in an ancient role.

Only those closest to Rania knew the tiara was borrowed goods, lent by her sister-in-law, Princess Haya. "Why should I spend a vast amount of money on something I will not wear very often?" explained Rania at the time. And when Throne Day finally wound to a close, Their Majesties Abdullah and Rania retreated not to one of the eight royal palaces scattered around the capital but to their four-story home on the outskirts of Amman.

An ordinary house instead of a palace, a borrowed tiara. What kind of queen is this?

Rania has been queen for one year, and already she is drawing comparisons to Princess Diana. Yet while Rania clearly has the photogenic looks, the glamour, and a talent for reaching out to ordinary people, she is no protocoljarring rebel, nor is she hampered by the neuroses that tormented Diana. More significantly, Rania and her husband are not figureheads-in-waiting: They are actual rulers who now must attempt to lead one of the most troubled Middle Eastern nations into the modern economy.

Although Rania is a hands-on wife and mother, with two small children and another baby due in September, she is fast becoming a central power broker in Jordanian political affairs. Queen Rania, in fact, has big ideas for the future of the country. She has become a champion of child abuse causes and women's rights-both taboo topics in the traditional Muslim state until now. She has advocated that every child be taught English so that Jordan can compete in the global market. She has lobbied to introduce computers into classrooms-in a country where many schools lack even basic furniture. And with her Palestinian heritage, she has become a symbol for the healing of intense ethnic divisions-Palestinians, despite the fact that they make up an estimated 65 percent of the population, are still denied many basic opportunities.

"The king chose as a bride someone he considers to be an equal," says Prince Zeid bin Raad, whose father was cousin to King Hussein and who was virtually raised with Abdullah. "He listens to her ideas. They feed each other's intellectual curiosity. They're a perfect match, two people very comfortable together, who think along the same wavelength, who > have the same kind of temperament. He always has a twinkle in his eye and a sense of mischief. And while she has poise and dignity, she can match him in this. They have a wonderfully warm and mutually supportive relationship."

In many ways, the king and queen have one foot in the future and one firmly planted in Abdullah's ancient family heritage, which dates back 1400 years, directly to the Prophet Mohammad, the founder of Islam. Although so far Rania's performance, in Jordan as in the West, is winning her raves, her life is-and will increasingly become-the kind of balancing act Princess Diana could only have imagined. If Diana felt ill-trained and ill-prepared for her role in a more benign Britain, can Queen Rania survive a much more delicate and difficult position in ultraconservative Jordan? Despite her regal bearing, Rania comes from relatively modest beginnings. She is the daughter of a Palestinian physician who emigrated to Kuwait in 1967 from the West Bank-Jordanian territory until it was annexed by Israel-in search of better economic opportunity. Rania grew up with her brother and sister in a second-story apartment on Baghdad Street in Kuwait City. Her father enrolled them all in the very formal New English School, where Rania managed A's in the sciences, math, and languages (she's fluent in English and speaks a passable French) but only B's in English literature, art, and music. "She was very quiet and well behaved," recalls Linda Saba, Rania's best friend, who rode home on the school bus with her every day. "Our biggest crime was sneaking a transistor radio into school, which was absolutely forbidden, so we could listen to the latest pop music on the FM station during break time."

During summer vacations, Rania traveled back to the West Bank to stay in Tulkarm with her aunt and uncle, Fadwa and Khaled Yassin, a retired schoolteacher turned bookstore owner. "She played basketball and chess with my children," her uncle recalls. It was in Tulkarm, then an overgrown village of orange groves, that Rania came to understand what it meant to be a disenfranchised Palestinian. At the time, Israeli troops frequently forced Arabs from their homes before promptly demolishing them with bulldozers to make way for Jewish settlements.

Years later, while Rania was an undergraduate at the American University in Cairo, studying business administration, her family was forced to leave Kuwait when that country, outraged at King Hussein's decision to align himself with Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War, expelled all Palestinians. "We were all very upset," says Dima Toukan, 30, whose dorm room was two doors down from Rania's. We were all so scared it would become a war that would engulf the entire Middle East. We spent all the time huddled around Rania's TV set. Rania and the rest of us were alternately sobbing and consoling one another. Everybody kept trying to reach their families by phone."

Nevertheless, Rania continued her studies at AUC, where she was a rather bookish student. "She had a couple of boyfriends," says Toukan, "one Palestinian, one Egyptianfellow students, nothing serious, just lunch, dinner, or a movie. But mostly, she went out in groups of friends." Toukan was surprised when Rania approached her during their senior year and suggested that the two of them become models. "She told me she'd met some French guy from a modeling agency who asked her," recalls Toukan, who thinks they were selected because they are both five feet seven inches-tall for Arab women. "But at the last minute, Rania had to back out. Her parents wouldn't let her do it."

After graduating in 1991, Rania moved to Amman, where her parents had relocated. She worked briefly in marketing at Apple Computers, and then at Citibank. Then, one evening in January of 1993, a friend from Apple invited her to a dinner party that just happened to be thrown by Prince Abdullah's sister, Princess Aisha. There she was introduced to the prince. Although Abdullah had a reputation as a ladies' man-"How much of one?" asks Prince Zeid with an embarrassed chuckle. "Let's just say Abdullah was loved by many, er, people"-the future king immediately fell hard for Rania.

King Hussein, thrilled about his son's new romance, wanted to hasten an engagement, and two months later, he drove Abdullah to the apartment building where Rania lived with her parents. In front of the king, as is Muslim custom, Abdullah asked Rania's parents' permission to marry their daughter. In June, the couple was married. In the middle of the wedding party, one of Abdullah's army buddies dramatically parachuted into the palace garden to cut the cake with a sword-and life was never the same for either of them again.

Until last year, neither Abdullah nor Rania ever knew they would be thrust into the roles of king and queen of Jordan. Although Abdullah is the eldest son of the late King Hussein, he had been removed from the royal succession at the age of three, when King Hussein named Abdullah's uncle Hassan crown prince. (This move was reportedly intended to ensure that Jordan would not be ruled by a small boy in the event that King Hussein was assassinated.) It was only two weeks before King Hussein died of cancer that he switched the succession back to Abdullah. Virtually without warning, the 36-year-old heir-and to a significant extent, Rania-were handed responsibility for all of Jordan.

It's not a small job, even by the standards of heads of state. Jordan is hobbled by a $7 billion international debt. Studies commissioned by Abdullah last year found that while the country's economy is one of the smallest and poorest in the Middle East, it is supported by only 15 percent of the workforce because so many Jordanians work for the huge and bloated government bureaucracy. Thirty percent of the Jordanian population lives in abject poverty, which is not surprising since one in three citizens is unemployed. Living conditions are made worse by perennially acute water shortages that have been exacerbated by a two-year drought. In Amman, homes receive water only two or three times a week. Outside the capital, food production-always low because only 4 percent of the land is arable-has been devastated.

Since being crowned, the royal couple has logged more frequent-flyer miles than any U.S. Secretary of State to meet with world leaders in a quest for debt relief and investment aid. Heads of state can be moved by people's suffering, says Hasan Abu-Nimah, Jordan's ambassador to the United Nations in New York, particularly when the emissaries are as personable and as charismatic as Jordan's king and queen. "Their Majesties receive a lot of support and sympathy and promises of financial aid," he says. "But we have received very little in practical terms. This is the way of politics." With tangible aid results thus far negligible, the king and queen are left to solve their country's problems with their own limited means.

Rania is as driven and goal-oriented as her husband (who often works 12 to 16 hours a day). While she frequently surprises interlocutors with the depth of her knowledge on topics ranging from osteoporosis (she's the new patron of the International Osteoporosis Federation), organ donation, and blood diseases to global economics and evolving business practices, a significant amount of the queen's work involves meeting her subjects and listening to their many problems. At least once a month, she visits schools, health-care centers, and individual homes throughout the country. When she can, she tries to direct needed medical equipment to a desperate hospital, or scare up supplies for a deprived classroom.

Much of Queen Rania's most pioneering work falls under the umbrella of the Jordan River Foundation, a group she founded herself in 1995. Particularly important to her is the Child Abuse Prevention Project-the first of its kind anywhere in the Arab world-which is currently planning to erect a prevention center that Rania hopes will be replicated in other countries. "There wasn't even any terminology for child abuse [when I got involved with the problem]," Rania told The Boston Globe in December. "It was a taboo subject."

Indeed, the challenges facing Rania are exacerbated by rigid Islamic tradition. For instance, a quirk in Jordanian law dictates that only a father or male guardian can report a case of abuse or incest. It is these family members, of course, who are frequently the abusers. Another major stumbling block, according to Leah Harrison at the Child Protection Center of New York's Montefiore Medical Center, who was flown to Jordan to consult with the queen on the project last year, is that children in Jordan