Royal Revolutionary
After her unexpected rise to the throne, Jordan’s Queen Rania has come into her own as a wife, mother, author and humanitarian, working tirelessly to bridge the cultural divide between the Arab and Western worlds
WORDS | HARRIET GREEN
PORTRAIT | LORENZO AGIUS
IN AMMAN’S MID-MORNING TRAFFIC, we are struggling to follow the Mercedes jeep driven by a lone woman ahead of us. Moments later, we halt outside the Royal Cultural Centre, and out of the car strides the dazzling Queen Rania Al-Abdullah.
All sunny smiles and laid-back charm, Jordan’s queen likes to keep things low-key when possible. But she has also gained an international reputation for combining her glamorous modern lifestyle with her charity work promoting women’s and children’s rights.
Earlier that morning, I first met Rania in her office inside a gleaming turreted fortress beside the King Hussein Memorial Park. As I waited for her, beset with flu, I worried about how she might react to my sniffing and sneezing.
With her big brown eyes, delicate features and glossy chestnut hair, she has a faun-like grace. Dressed simply but elegantly in a C by Chloe black jacket nipped at the waist, a pencil skirt and tan heels, she is regal yet down to earth. Noticing that I’m not in top form, she asks how I’m feeling and shares that she has a cold too. For a few minutes we compare symptoms and remedies. Hers are the transatlantic tones of the international educated elite. She comes across as a bright woman who believes passionately in what she does. In her case, that happens to be running a country.
She has come a long way. The daughter of a Palestinian paediatrician, Rania Al-Yasin was born in August 1970, grew up in Kuwait, and attended an English-run school and the American University in Cairo, before beginning a career with Citibank. She moved on to IT development for Apple. Her family fled to Jordan from Kuwait when Saddam Hussein invaded in 1990. “I loved Jordan the minute I arrived.”
At a dinner party given by one of King Hussein’s daughters, she was introduced to his eldest son, Prince Abdullah. She has said it was love at first sight. Abdullah’s mother was the British-born Princess Muna (née Toni Gardner), the second of King Hussein’s four wives. Abdullah was educated in Britain at Oxford and Georgetown University in the US, where he wrote his thesis on the Arab-Israeli conflict: English is his first language. In June 1993, just six months after their first meeting, the couple married. They led privileged if relatively low-key lives. Prince Abdullah continued his career in the military and Rania gave birth to two children. (They now have four: Prince Hussein, 16, Princess Iman, 13, Princess Salma, nine, and Prince Hashem, five).
King Hussein was meant to be succeeded by his brother, Crown Prince Hassan. But early in 1999, just before dying of cancer, Hussein changed his mind in favour of Abdullah. It radically altered the lives of Abdullah, then 37, and Rania, still only 28. She confesses that, with two small children and the expectations ahead, she was terrified when she became queen. “It was a tremendous shift in my life, and a huge responsibility suddenly cast on my shoulders,” she says.
“It was a shock for [my husband]. He didn’t expect it. He was pursuing a military career and that was the way he saw his life moving. We had to stand together and see each other through.” With her support, Abdullah took the risk of donning disguises – as a TV reporter and a white-bearded sheikh – and travelling around to see the conditions in his country.
If Rania has made the job of queen her own, that has been made much easier by the precedent set by Hussein’s widow, Noor (the American-born Lisa Halaby), likewise beautiful and intelligent. But Rania’s early public profile was focused on her looks and clothes. There were comparisons to Jacqueline Kennedy and Princess Diana, and she became a favourite of fashion magazines and gossip columns. This led to some calling her ‘the handbag Queen’, and even serious commentators grumbled about palace over-spending. She seems unfazed, calling it “part of the turf”, but adding: “If the gossip gets out of hand, I may have to look at myself and ask, ‘Am I doing something wrong?’”
As she sees it, it’s crucial for the monarchy to be accessible to ordinary Jordanians. She’s often seen in local Amman restaurants with her friends and family, goes shopping with her children and has even run a marathon (she always listens to her iPod when she runs: “My eldest son keeps downloading new tunes he thinks I’ll like when I discover them on shuffle!”).
In the Arab world, at the present time, the best way to fight extremism is to create opportunity, she says – education, job opportunities, openness, justice and human rights. “Once you have all those things, by default, the extremist ideology will have no place in your society.” She has been recognised globally for her humanitarian efforts through her own Jordan River Foundation as well as other organisations such as Unicef. “An education can be the difference between life and death. When a girl goes to high school, she’s equipped, empowered and inspired to break the cycle of poverty that shackles her to hopelessness. And when you break the cycle of poverty, you spark a cycle of prosperity. You raise nations.”
Rania passionately believes in soft power, which comes from diplomacy rather than force. “Soft power is real power,” she explains. “Power that comes from trust, caring and goodwill is the kind that produces lasting change. People feel they can own it.”
Even during the unstable period during the last Iraq war, when suicide bombs went off at three Amman hotels, Rania went into the city with Maha Khatib, Jordan’s minister of tourism and antiquities. “Suddenly I found her crossing the street to talk to 1,000 people,” says Khatib. “When you live in a troublesome and turbulent region, sometimes I think we need more security to protect her. But she’s so in love with the people that sometimes she rebels.”
Committed to modernity and tradition, Rania actively tries to bridge the gap between the West and Middle East. A few months ago, she published a children’s book, The Sandwich Swap, which recently crept into the New York Times bestseller list. It’s based on an experience in her own childhood when at the age of five she felt queasy setting eyes on her American friend’s peanut butter-and-jam sandwich. To her mind, a good sandwich had hummus in it. But one day she tried her friend’s sandwich and, surprisingly, found it delicious. The book is a metaphor for tolerance and understanding, for embracing what seems foreign, and was a direct response to the events of 9/11. “When something as terrible as a terrorist attack happens you can either let the fear take over and close your heart off or you can open yourself up and face new truths and learn more. And your life can be enriched when you do that.”
“What I hope,” she adds, “is that young readers will catch a glimpse of themselves in The Sandwich Swap, and take from the story the same lessons I learned: that we shouldn’t fear what we don’t know and that we can find wonderful things in the strangest of places.”
A close relative tells me the family always had confidence in Rania. “If anyone could pull off being a queen, Rania could. In school she was always a high achiever. Conscientiousness was always on her report card. But we had a very normal childhood. She makes sure she spends a lot of time with all of us. We see her regularly. Two or three times a week. Obviously things have changed. She is a lot busier. She positively inhales good causes. But as a family we carry on exactly as before.”
Abdullah, too, has supported Rania in her work. “He’s the antithesis of a chauvinist. He very much believes in women being active. I’m lucky to have a husband like that.”
Can she ever escape from being queen? “Not really! I do miss being anonymous. I am by nature a shy person.” She describes London as one of her favourite places in the world (she was recently photographed with Uma Thurman at a children’s charity gala in Waterloo station). “I shop with the children, buy them books, do all the things that people enjoy doing. I walk all over the place – King’s Road, Notting Hill. I love to go to art galleries. In the UK, even if you get recognised, they respect your space. I’m not a celebrity, I’m not a rock star. And that works for me! And in a sense, I feel fortunate. I can have the best of both worlds, where I can have the profile to influence issues and causes that are dear to me, but I don’t have to deal too much with the inconvenience of celebrity, including the paparazzi.”
Certainly, she has tried to keep life as normal as possible for her children. The family live in a luxurious villa in the western suburbs of Amman. It’s big, but far from palatial. Last July, it was officially announced that Queen Rania’s oldest son, Prince Hussein, will be heir to the throne, something Rania has mixed feelings about. “As a mum, part of me wants him to have an ordinary life and normal teenage experience and friends, but another part of me understands that by having the title he can learn more about the people, the problems and the protocol of our country without being under too much pressure.”
The children, she is keen to point out, have been brought up to be as normal as possible. But if your father is king, normality is a relative term. A very modern royal, Rania has more than one million followers on Twitter (@QueenRania). She regularly posts intimate pictures of her children and her husband. One TwitPic shows Rania, Abdullah and teenage Hussein with the caption: ‘Make the most of these moments before ur kids decide ur too uncool to be seen with in public.’
“No matter how much I try, they are not as normal as other kids,” she admits. “At the end of the day, what happens is that their friends, their friends’ parents, the people around them, look at them as being the children of the king after a certain age.
“The way to protect them is to embed the right values. To teach them honesty, humility and make sure they respect others.” Regardless of the children’s immense privilege, she wants them to grow up with – well, the same values as she did. “I want them to feel that they have to work hard to achieve the results they want. That it’s not just going to come by virtue of who they are. None of that is automatic. If you want to go to a good school, you’d better get good grades. If you want to have real friends, then you’d better work hard at being nice to people.” But for Rania, this is something that seems to come easily.
RANIA’S TRAVEL TIPS
ADVENTURE SEEKERS would probably love mountain-climbing and hand-gliding over the Mars-scape of Wadi Rum’s desert. Only an hour away, they can strap on their hiking boots and explore the endless trails around our ancient, stone-carved, red-rose ancient city of Petra. You can rest your carbon footprints at one of our many sustainable natural parks, like Feynan Eco Lodge, after you’ve trekked through the prehistoric Great Rift Valley in Dana Reserve. If you’re into literary classics, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by TE Lawrence is unbeatable and beautifully written, if sometimes factually flawed. Many of his campaigns during World War I took place here in Jordan; his face is even etched into a rock in Wadi Rum.
THE REST-AND-RELAXATION TOURISTS should put their feet up at the Dead Sea, where we have the region’s largest spa to accompany the mineral-rich mud and salt waters that rejuvenate your spirits.
If you fancy a dip in less salty seas, then Aqaba is a great place to cool off from the desert heat, either lounging on our beaches or on the decks of a sail boat. Most weekends and holidays we try to get away as a family to our home there. We can breathe in the fresh Red Sea air, listen to the waves beat on the shore and let any stress drift out with the tide.
Jordan is also famous for its RELIGIOUS TOURISM: we’re proud keepers of many religious sites, including the baptism site of Jesus, Mount Nebo, where Moses saw the Holy Land; and even Lot’s Cave.
But wherever you go, I can guarantee you’ll be welcomed. Jordanians are famed for our hospitality and generosity. Feel free to accept a cup of tea and chat with the locals: it’s the best way to get to know our beautiful country.
