Jewel in the Crown
The new
queen of Jordan is young, tall, beautiful, smart, and determined to right
the wrongs of her country.
Queen Rania's coronation was never supposed
to occur. When, at age 22, Rania Al-Yasin married Prince Abdullah of
Jordan — King Hussein's eldest son by a wife he had divorced years before
— her new husband was simply one prince among many. Rania was a commoner,
from a Palestinian refugee family, no less. Her husband's father was on
the throne with his fourth wife, American-born Lisa Halaby, known as Queen
Noor, beside him. Hussein's dull and courtly brother, Hassan, was crown
prince.
During the six years between their marriage and King
Hussein's death in 1999, Rania and Abdullah were just attractive young
royals about Amman, Jordan's capital. They were peripheral to local
gossip, not particularly notable except for the fact that Abdullah, an
army man who loves flying and driving fast cars, had stopped his fabled
womanizing, and Rania was very, very pretty. And now they were very, very
married. Almost a year to the day after their wedding, their first child,
whom they named for his grandfather, was born. King Hussein loved baby
Hussein, eldest son of his eldest son.
On his deathbed, King
Hussein switched the long-accepted line of dynastic succession, bypassing
Hassan and making Abdullah crown prince instead. Two weeks later, the king
was dead and Abdullah, who had just turned 37, became the new king.
"It was a big shock to me," says Rania, opening her wide eyes
wider. "First of all, to lose the king, whom we all loved so much. And
then, the other thing." Hussein's death at the age of 63 and the new
succession came as shocks to all of Jordan, but people gathered happily in
the streets for the coronation of the young, vital king, and camels
bearing high-ranking soldiers bowed to their knees for him. The elegant
new queen was correctly restrained yet charming and welcoming. She looked
like a royal Arab fantasy in her traditional embroidered dress. (Although
Queen Noor retained her title, it is now more of an affectionate honorific
than an official designation. Noor's son, Prince Hamzah, is next in line
to the throne—a line of succession that could change as Prince Hussein
matures.)
Two years later Queen Rania has traveled the planet,
from small villages in Kosovo to Washington, D.C. She has met with some of
the world's most important people.
"You think it is like a fairy
tale," she says today, sitting in a plush suite in a Washington hotel. "It
sounds like a fairy tale." She recrosses her long legs and adjusts the
collar of her blouse. "But in fact, it is not a fairy tale." Rania shakes
her head. Her thick, long, honey-brown hair tumbles around her face.
"Being queen is overrated," she says. Being queen, she says, is more like
running a very big and very serious business. She smiles a wide, white
smile. Rania, it turns out, loves business. And she is very, very serious.
—Amy Wilentz
What
do you think about the queen's story?
Back to Articles&Interviews
