AP / Queen Rania is part of the new generation of Jordanian leaders.

Queen Rania of Jordan is a gorgeous 30-year-old business school graduate who talks enthusiastically about microfinance.

She is half of the Mideast's most intriguing couple, wife to King Abdullah II of Jordan, who unexpectedly inherited the throne two years ago on the death of the legendary King Hussein. Abdullah wants to integrate his small country into the globalized world.

The Jordanian monarch has laboured mightily to modernize his kingdom's economy. Jordan joined the World Trade Organization, pushed high-tech education and signed a free-trade agreement with the United States that includes labour and environmental standards. All this in addition to Jordan's 1994 peace pact with Israel, which Abdullah has hewed to. But can-do Jordan keeps getting tripped up by events beyond its control.

"Jordan has always been pulled back by events," Queen Rania noted ruefully in an interview, while on a state visit with her husband in Washington. Renewed Palestinian-Israeli violence has scared off foreign investment in Jordanian free-trade zones. Peace with Israel hasn't opened up the Israeli market to Jordanian exports and the U.S. Congress has still to ratify the free-trade agreement.

And yet a talk with Queen Rania gives a glimpse of Jordan's potential. Her husband is part of a new generation of rulers in Jordan, Syria and the Persian Gulf who could lead the region toward a better future if they can look beyond the Israeli-Palestinian issue. And, as an educated woman in a region where women's issues are low on the agenda, she is already an example of change.

The daughter of a Palestinian pediatrician from the West Bank, Rania symbolizes the complexity of a kingdom in which more than half of the 5 million citizens are of Palestinian origin. She grew up in Kuwait and graduated from the American University of Cairo, working for Apple Computer in Amman before she met her husband. As queen, she works to promote programs that offer microloans (and train microfinance staff) to help small-business people, mostly women. She often drives her four-wheel-drive BMW into the field unannounced to check on microfinance projects.

The queen cites with pride the success of an innovative young woman graduate who used her microloan to set up a photography shop that serves veiled women who don't want to be photographed by men. She has also promoted the establishment of the first child-abuse counseling and treatment centre in the Arab world - in Amman - and the building of Jordan's first 50 preschool centres. The mother of three, she also champions the king's project to install computers and the Internet in every school.

And - in a bold move for a society split between modernizers and traditionalists - the royal couple backed a campaign for strong laws against honour killings, the murders by men (or even mothers) of women suspected of "dishonouring" the family by improper sexual conduct. The legislation failed.

"If there was opposition to changes, it is because there was a lack of awareness," she said. "Most people don't understand this is completely against Islam." Looking back, she regrets the campaigners worked from the top down, because they were eager to move quickly against the practice. "It was important to have a grass-roots campaign to educate the public, and that's what we are doing right now."

Indeed, some critics charge that the royal couple is not in touch with the grass roots - moving too fast toward an economic modernization whose costs are not yet apparent, and too slowly on political reforms. They carp that King Abdullah, who was educated in Europe and the United States and whose mother is British, speaks better English than Arabic and is too focused on the West.

True, these royals look West, but that doesn't mean they don't look East also. (Abdullah's Web site, www.kingabdullah.jo, features a jazzy montage of photos backed by an audio stream of Arabic music.) Their vision - which I heard Abdullah lay out impressively at the World Economic Forum 2000 in Davos, Switzerland - is to use Jordan's well-educated populace to produce the first high-tech parks and economy in the Arab Levant.

It hasn't worked so far, and Jordanians are growing impatient. But that doesn't mean the vision isn't the right one, the best hope to lift Jordan out of economic stagnation. The least the U.S. Congress could do to help is to get that free-trade agreement ratified ASAP.