Jordan's Queen Rania is direct on many subjects, including the situation of Arab women: "There are certain cultural beliefs that are a problem. And they do stand in the way of the situation for women changing." (Andrea Bruce Woodall - The Washington Post)

By Ann Gerhart
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 1, 2002; Page C01

There are the queens who live in fairy tales.

There are the queens who keep corgis and their distance, who wear elaborate hats and have 100-year-old mothers whom everybody loves more than them.

There are the queens who smoke too much and misbehave, and the ones who throw fits about their sons' choices of brides.

Queens have no term limits. They tend to last forever. We get bored with them eventually, and they fade into a haze of gloves and crowns.

Then there is the world's youngest queen, Rania al-Abdullah of Jordan. She is 31 and fresh and smart and gorgeous, Vogue material. When she married King Hussein's son Abdullah, she was a commoner -- certainly an uncommon one, but still -- destined to live as a mere princess. But days before his 1999 death of cancer, Hussein abruptly changed the accession from his own brother to Abdullah, and the young couple were thrust to the throne. Unlike their European counterparts, these two are not ceremonial monarchs but working leaders of a tiny, troubled nation in a very rough neighborhood. That they should be reigning at all is a historical hash of British-drawn boundaries and wandering nomads and desert feuds.

Negotiating the paradox between modernity and monarchy is the least of their problems.

Every escalation of violence in neighboring Israel threatens the fragile stability of a nation where 60 percent of the population is Palestinian. While the literacy rate of the 5 million Jordanians approaches 90 percent, a hefty majority of the population is under 30 and growing at a rate faster than the economy. Jordanians are poor and hungry.

Her Royal Highness is seated on a hotel suite sofa for an interview. She is in the middle of an erudite examination of the misunderstandings between the Western and Muslim worlds when she interrupts herself midsentence.

"Are you checking out what I'm wearing?" she demands.

Actually, Your Majesty, we were.

"I could tell!" she says, laughing. "I could tell what was going through your mind!" And then, a smooth segue back to diplo-speak: "Anyway, that kind of segregation of the world -- us vs. them -- is very dangerous, and we have to make an effort to get over it. This stereotyping is something that baffles me, because although information is so easily accessible, we seem to know less about each other."

We are shamefaced with our superficiality.

Yet this is the way of Rania. She leads with her beauty. There is nothing else for her to do with it. It precedes her everywhere she goes, grabbing the attention of powerful men and accomplished women. In New York, at a dinner she sponsors for the Vaccine Fund, guests crane their necks to see her coming; they whisper excitedly. Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) is rushing out, but stops to embrace Rania. The world's richest man, Bill Gates, stops talking to watch her work the room, her dark eyes flashing, her long legs pivoting like a runway model's.

With beauty like hers, the brains always come as a shock, fair or not. Rania plays with this. "She makes the words 'infrastructure' and 'outsourcing' sound sexy," says a gentleman listening to her address the dinner on the urgency for global childhood immunizations.

Since Sept. 11, the queen has emerged in the West as a model of Muslim moderation, an implicit rebuke to those who cloak and silence women in the name of Islam. Self-assured and outspoken, she tackles topics controversial and diplomatically sensitive. The bookers love her on "Larry King Live" and "Oprah" and the morning shows. At the recent World Economic Forum, she held her own in the opening session with Elie Wiesel and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. She descends on Washington every few months, dazzling policy wonks with her command of micro-finance and child vaccination and technology education.

At home, she is a vocal partner in leading Jordan. Unlike first ladies who defer with phrases like "my husband's policies," Rania, when discussing the king's plans for progress, uses the pronoun "we."

Her 40-year-old husband of eight years "is not at all intimidated" by her, she says. "He sees us as teamwork. He really does believe that no country can advance without the full participation of 50 percent of its people," meaning women.

The accidental queen, born Rania al-Yasin, has lived the dichotomy of her region, both a beneficiary of the splendid oil wealth of the Persian Gulf and a witness to the disenfranchisement of so many of its people. She was born in Kuwait after her Palestinian father, a pediatrician, and mother moved from the West Bank in the 1960s. She went to a prestigious school where instruction was in English, and spent summers with her aunt and uncle back in the West Bank town of Tulkarm, where Palestinian homes were bulldozed to make way for Israeli settlements.

During the queen's years at the English-speaking American University in Cairo, her family was uprooted again, expelled with other Palestinians from Kuwait after the Gulf War. (King Hussein had aligned himself with Saddam Hussein.) Rania rejoined her parents in Jordan, taking her business degree first to Apple, then Citibank.

One January evening in 1993, Rania went to a dinner party at the home of Princess Aisha, who had conveniently invited her brother Abdullah. The head of the Jordanian military's special operations, the prince had more than a passing reputation as a playboy and gadabout. But he was reportedly instantly smitten by the slender woman towering over him.

Within a few months, they were engaged, and by June, they had wed.

Rania laughs when asked if her husband chose her because she speaks her mind.

"You'll have to ask him," she says. "I'm not sure why he picked me. You know, when we met it was just a normal story, just a boy-meets-girl kind of thing," as if normal courtship involved joy riding in helicopters. "It was just like any other relationship, and I don't think either one of us analyzed what we saw in each other.

"And certainly neither one of us thought we would be in this position anyway, to think about what kind of qualities might be advantageous."

Abdullah had not been groomed to assume the throne, and the sudden transition to power was "quite challenging," she says. "We were traumatized by the loss of King Hussein, who was a very important component of our lives. I had very young children (Prince Hussein was then 4, Princess Iman was 2), and at the same time there were different things that I was required to do that I never thought I would have to do."

When she was a mere princess, she had control over the public and private aspects of her life. "Now, those lines are becoming slowly blurred," Rania says.

When she talks about struggling to balance work and family life, she can sound like any modern professional woman -- albeit one with a very fine handbag collection.

"My trips are never more than a few days," she says. "We could have stretched this one, but we wanted to get back home and be with the children."

The couple have spurned palace living, choosing to stay in their home in a wealthy suburb of Amman. They frequently retreat to their weekend home in the port city of Aqaba, where the buildings of Eilat, Israel, are visible across the shimmering Gulf of Aqaba. "You try to grab the moments when you can," she says.

Rania is known for jumping behind the wheel of her BMW four-wheel drive and taking off, her guards tailing her in a chase car. She likes to be alone and listen to music -- maybe Arab pop, maybe Lauryn Hill -- and think.

She is asked to consider the oddity of being a queen, of having a 17-month-old toddling about known to her subjects as Princess Salma. "I know, I know," Rania says. "The whole thing about kings and queens, it's an alien concept."

As skillfully as she glides through most queenly obligations, there are a few glitches.

The Royal Hashemite Court-iers still have to tell her when to wear the tiara.

"Oh, they let me know," says Rania, who borrows a tiara when she needs it from her sister-in-law, and she rolls her eyes just a bit. "These kinds of things don't come to me instinctively. Somebody has to come and tell me."

On the other hand, when she is addressed as Your Majesty, she never once is heard to say, "Oh, just call me Rania."

Here is what the queen is wearing for daytime business: A cashmere charcoal gray turtleneck sweater. A very chic fitted black skirt with a nipped white collar that emphasizes her small waist. On her fingers, only a thin golden wedding band. On her neck, an understated lanyard dangling a small diamond. On her feet, killer stiletto black pumps, with impossibly pointed toes she claims are quite comfortable. Whose?

"I don't even know," she says. "Why don't you have a look?" And she withdraws her queenly foot from her queenly shoe and points. The instep says Sergio Rossi, the Milanese creator of the world's sexiest shoes, priced $300 and up.

The queen is amused.

"I think more people from my part of the world should reach out and try to explain what Islam is about," says Rania.

Take the veil, which she notes is seen in the West as a symbol of oppression and backwardness.

"Now I've been asked a million times," she says, "why I don't wear the veil. The veil does not represent backwardness necessarily, and removing the veil does not necessarily represent modernity. A woman can be wearing her veil and she can still pursue her education and go to work and be active in society. And if we view women wearing the veil to be subservient to God, that is a decision which has to be respected."

That said, she suggests that diversity of customs in the Muslim world should not interfere with basic human rights. Asked about Saudi Arabia, where women only recently were issued national identity cards, Rania says, "There are certain cultural beliefs that are a problem. And they do stand in the way of the situation for women changing."

In Jordan, the queen, like Queen Noor before her, has spoken out against "honor killings," the practice of murdering women who have sex outside marriage, and established a center for abused women and children. She is big on micro-finance as a tool to lift women out of poverty and dependence.

"You can go to a remote village and take a woman who has some skills but has never really worked and encourage her to come up with a business plan, and she will apply and get a loan," Rania says. "She becomes much more confident, because she is taking charge of her life and her family."

Rania does not confine herself to domestic affairs. During the interview, she sighed about "the vicious cycle of violence" in the Middle East, condemned Palestinian suicide bombings and said abandoning the peace process "is just not an option. The only problem is that there is now a generation that has been brought up feeling there is so much rage. Politics aside, let's look at the way people are living on the ground. They don't have freedom of movement. They don't have access to health care or education. That kind of environment makes you very, very angry. And that probably leads to such attacks, but it's wrong."

This penchant to display opinions along with her legs has its critics.

"In the West, everybody is dazzled by this couple," says Murhaf Jouejati, a resident scholar at the Middle East Institute. "In the Arab world, more conservative elements frown upon her westernization, and some would like her to take a back seat rather than be as flamboyant as she is."

"You can't expect everyone to agree with you," says Rania, "but that is healthy, because a lot of times you learn from the criticism you hear. It's important to be honest and transparent with people and let them know, 'I'm doing this because I think this will improve the quality of life in this particular area.' "

In a black lace sheath skirt and banded satin spike evening pumps, Her Majesty steps to the lectern at the Vaccine Fund dinner, which raises $3 million. Gates started the fund three years ago with $750 million ("My hand trembled a little bit writing the check," he says.) and a simple but huge goal, to vaccinate every child everywhere. Rania accepted a position on the board and plunged in.

"She's a great spokeswoman worldwide," says Gates. "It takes someone to jar people's attention."

"She is extremely knowledgeable about so many topics," says Clinton, who first worked with Rania during her White House tenure. "In offering up a view of Muslim modernity, she is important to the world, not just her country."

The queen sweeps the room with her politician's practiced gaze. This speech, like most she delivers, she has written herself, in her direct, almost blunt, style. "Vaccination itself is a metaphor for what the fund seeks to achieve," she says, "a small sacrifice now to avert death and disaster later. It creates strong, healthy lives that enable children to learn, communities to grow and countries to prosper."

She sits down. She tilts her head and listens intently to her dinner companions. She eats what's put in front of her, and then her dessert. When Queen Rania rises to leave, all the men at her table, including New York Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz.) leap to their feet. Quickly, everybody in the room is standing, napkins floating off laps onto the floor, worrying over protocol. How to behave when a queen is in your midst?

Her Majesty smiles widely and gives a little wave.

She says, "See ya."