Newsmaker: Queen Rania

The Jordanian royal enhanced her international reputation this week when she publicly responded to a Charlie Hebdo cartoon. It’s the latest triumph in her distinguished public life.

Kagan McLeod for The National

In July 2001, graduates gathering for the degree congregation at the University of Exeter eagerly awaited words of wisdom from the guest speaker, Queen Rania Al Abdullah of ­Jordan, on how to prepare for the future they now faced.

Her advice? “Don’t worry about it,” she told them. “And believe me, I know what I’m talking about when it comes to not anticipating what the future may bring.”

Ten years earlier, as a young woman studying business administration at the American University in Cairo, her future path had seemed broadly similar to that of the graduates she addressed that summer’s day in England.

After she graduated, the private sector beckoned, first with a job at Citibank in Amman, then in the computer business with Apple. But in 1993, barely two years after university, she met a dashing young Jordanian army officer at a dinner party. Within six months, they were married.

Rania Al Yassin was born in Kuwait on August 31, 1970, the daughter of a doctor, Faisal Sedki Al Yassin, and Ilham Yassin, both of Palestinian descent.

“I’m a strong believer in fate and destiny,” she once said, and in 1991 fate took a hand in her future, in the form of the Gulf War. Fleeing Kuwait, her family settled in Jordan. The rest is history.

Though her family background could hardly be described as humble, marrying Prince Abdullah bin Al Hussein, the eldest son of Jordan’s late King Hussein, and a 41st-generation direct descendant of the Prophet ­Mohammed, was a dramatic elevation in status and responsibility for which nothing could have prepared her.

Then, in 1999, the stakes got higher. In the last days of his life, the ailing King Hussein, who ruled Jordan for almost half a century, announced that his eldest son, and not his brother, would be his heir.

After Hussein’s death, on ­February 7, 1999, she was now found married to King ­Abdullah II, and referred to as Queen ­Rania Al Abdullah. Such privilege, she quickly learnt, came with ­responsibilities.

“At times, I miss the days when I could just put my head down on my pillow with nothing to worry about but my own family,” she said, about a year into her new role. “Now, I think about whether we’ve got enough rain this season, whether we’re making enough economic progress, I think of the woman I met on the street whose son is ill and she doesn’t have enough money to treat him.”

Thankfully, she has proved to be a natural, at home in TV studios, on global stages and in the company of world leaders or the humblest subjects.

From the outset she has held the world's media spellbound, dazzled by her beauty and fashion sense – she was "the world's most glamorous monarch", wrote Hello! magazine in 2005.

But it soon became apparent that Queen Rania was much more than just a pretty face and expensive dresses. The women and children of Jordan and the wider Middle East had found a champion and a role model who would empower them.

She has also become an ambassador for her faith, using her access to Western media to speak out against misrepresentation of Islam, by terrorist organisations and undiscerning commentators alike.

It was this "soft power" that last Friday saw the world's media pick up her rebuke of Charlie Hebdo for what many saw as its insensitive depiction of Aylan Kurdi, the 3-year-old Syrian refugee who drowned in September during an attempt by his family to flee to Greece by boat.

Queen Rania published a cartoon of her own, drawn with the help of Jordanian cartoonist Osama Hajjaj, showing Aylan becoming a doctor, with the caption: “What would little Aylan have grown up to be?”

Queen Rania shared the cartoon with her 4.5 million followers on Twitter – where she describes herself as “a mum and a wife with a really cool day job” – and on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Flickr.

Cool it might be, but marrying the namesake of King Abdullah I, her husband’s great-grandfather and the founder of modern Jordan, was to assume a heavy mantel of responsibility.

Queen Rania gave birth to two children before her husband was crowned king – Hussein, now the Crown Prince, in 1994, and Iman in 1996. Two more have followed since: Salma in 2000, and Hashem in 2005. From the outset of her royal career, however, she made it clear she would be a working mother.

A western TV crew who followed her for a few days in 2000 were surprised to find her driving herself to official engagements and getting out of her car to talk to ordinary Jordanians on the streets. “In a region where the wives of kings and presidents normally stay way in the background,” reported CNN, “she does not.”

Queen Rania will be a keynote speaker at next month’s ­Global Women’s Forum in Dubai, alongside the likes of Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, and Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed, the UAE’s Minister of ­Foreign Affairs.

It’s a fitting engagement: Queen Rania devotes much of her time to improving the lot of the women and children of Jordan. One of her initiatives is a programme of small loans, designed to help women set up their own businesses. It is, she has said, “incredible to see how a loan of about US$200 [Dh735] can transform a person’s life.

“She is independent, she feels empowered, she has more control over her life and is a ­decision-maker within her own household.”

One of her earliest initiatives was the Jordan River ­Foundation, set up in 1995 to “engage Jordanians to realise their full economic potential and overcome social challenges”. One of the social challenges it confronted was child abuse, leading to Jordan becoming the first country in the region to develop a national protection ­programme.

But it’s education – especially for girls – that’s the Queen’s main passion. In 2013, she was at the Global Education First ­Initiative in New York to present the Clinton Global Citizen Award for Civil Society to Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani girl shot by the ­Taliban in 2012 for campaigning for girls’ education.

“What the Arab world needs today is an educational revolution,” Queen Rania later said. “We need a fundamental change that will fulfil every parent’s ambition to provide their child with a quality education.”

The umbrella organisation she founded to achieve this ambition was the Queen Rania Foundation for Education and Development, which aims “to improve learning opportunities for children and young people in Jordan so that they are equipped with the knowledge, skills, and values that will allow them to excel in a fast-paced and increasingly competitive world”.

Since the early 2000s, she has raised funding for her various projects by writing several children's books. One, The Sandwich Swap, which was published in 2010, told the story of two girls, best friends who "overcome their differences and embrace ­diversity". It became a New York Times bestseller.

Her work has earned her global recognition and numerous awards and decorations, including the Atlantic Council’s ­Global Citizen Award in 2013 in recognition of her global humanitarian and education efforts. She dedicated it to the people of Jordan. “It is from them from whom I’ve learnt most about how to be a global citizen,” she said at the ceremony in New York. “Their humanity and ­benevolence, especially towards the Syrian people at this time, continue to move me.”

The plight of the four million refugees who have fled the crisis in Jordan’s northern neighbour Syria has been at the forefront of the queen’s thoughts. There are about 1.4 million Syrians living in Jordan, of which 630,000 are registered as refugees.

“We cannot fail these people,” she told CNN in September. “What is our message to them if we don’t help them? That although you have risked everything to reject an extreme ideology of hatred and division, we are sending you right back to it?”

She has also become an effective spokesperson for the Islamic world in the West. In June last year she took the opportunity to speak for the majority when, to loud applause, she told a conference in London it was time to “drop the first ‘I’ in ISIS, because there’s nothing Islamic about them”.

Back in 2000, fresh to the job and in her first televised interview since the coronation, she told CNN: “I don’t think anybody comes prepared and knowing how to be a queen”. She paused and added with a smile: “I wish there were some self-help books on the market to help with that.”

If anyone is qualified to write one, it’s the woman who has not only adapted with apparent ease to life in one of the most distinguished families of the Arab world, but also has done so with such energy and passion that she has become the face and voice of progress and compassion for an entire region.

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