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Queen Rania of Jordan, born Rania al Yassin in 1970, is the wife of King Abdullah II of Jordan.

What is known of her early life is that she was born in Kuwait to Palestinian parents. She attended primary and secondary school at New English School in Kuwait and then earned a degree in Business Administration from the American University in Cairo. She graduated in 1991 and after that Queen Rania worked at Citibank and Apple Computer in Jordan. She met Jordanian King Abdullah bin Al-Hussein, then Prince, at a dinner party in 1993. Two months after that, they announced their engagement. They were married on June 10, 1993. Queen Rania is a mother of four children but the interesting fact is that her personality has become larger than life. She is being admired for more than her beauty, elegance and her role as a royalty. Time magazine paid a tribute to her in an article published in 2006 (http://www.time.com/time/europe/hero2006/rania.html). The article in praise of Queen Rania reads as follows.

The Queen of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan is a key interlocutor between Arabs and the West. An unlikely voice of reason sounded in the Middle East following al-Qaeda’s Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S. Women’s participation in politics is still something of a novelty in the region, and this voice was female. Moreover, it issued from an improbably beautiful Queen. It would have been all too easy to dismiss Queen Rania Al-Abdullah of Jordan as a creation of the Western media, eager for sympathetic interlocutors from the Muslim world. But her brave stand on issues like Arab reform quickly established her as far more than that.

In 1999, while still in her 20s, the graduate in business administration had been thrust into a frontline role as a royal with the death of her legendary father-in-law, King Hussein. As the wife and partner of King Abdullah II, Rania, now 36, uses her position to campaign for Arab women’s rights and keener Western understanding of Muslims. It’s hard to say which of her self-appointed tasks is more crucial to the troubled region’s future: as a role model for young Arab women or as an articulate Arab spokeswoman.

Rania is not fixated on royal pomp and ceremony, preferring seminars on social change and high-level talking shops like the World Economic Forum. She presses world leaders to fill what she calls the “hope gap,” which separates children who grow up looking forward to life and those caught in poverty or conflict who don’t. She perseveres even though her agenda is not always appreciated in the conservative Hashemite Kingdom. She helped win more representation for women in the Jordanian parliament, but utterly failed to see passage of legislation ensuring severe penalties for “honor crimes” — when male relatives murder women who are accused of dishonoring the family through sexual misconduct.

Her Jordan River Foundation seeks to empower women through a microcredit program enabling them to start small businesses, and established the region’s first shelter for abused children, too. In a Time interview two years ago, Rania said she was becoming more patient with age but would not retreat from her beliefs. “We need an honest debate to change the old traditional mind-sets and liberate women from societal constraints that hold them back,” she explained.

Though Queen of an Arab dynasty, Rania is no stranger to the turmoil that has afflicted millions of ordinary Arabs. Her father is a Palestinian who fled the West Bank when Israel captured the territory in 1967. She was born in Kuwait, which the family then abandoned for Jordan after the Iraqi invasion in 1990. Such experiences molded a future activist as much as a Queen. “She doesn’ t go around through the rituals,” says former U.S. President Bill Clinton, who has worked with Rania on international children’ s issues. “She is interested in the issues and wants to make a positive impact.” Fortunately for Jordanians—and for a world eternally grappling with Middle East conflicts—she is doing just that.

Tags: mother, Queen Rania

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 16th, 2009 at 6:10 AM and is filed under Celebrated Moms. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.