If the veiled woman has become the symbol of the culture clash between East and West, Queen Rania is her nemesis. Jordan’s young queen, who has reigned over the Middle Eastern kingdom with her husband King Abdullah for nearly seven years, is on a charm offensive to present a new kind of Arab woman to the world.
Rania, 35, the privileged daughter of a paediatrician, educated in international schools, has never worn the veil, nor will she. “In Jordan we believe there should be no coercion under Islam,” she says. “Unfortunately, people think of the Middle East as a monolithic whole, but each country has its own characteristics, its own level of stability and security and its own level of openness for women.”
It irks her that westerners in any case see the veil as a sign of helplessness and oppression: “To us it’s a sign of modesty and devotion to God and it’s up to women whether they wear it.”
A mother of four who admits she was “terrified” when she discovered that she was to become queen, Rania describes herself as “an Arab woman through and through”, but has the international look of a supermodel. With her dark almond eyes and high cheekbones, she could be from anywhere, one of the reasons she has slipped so easily onto the world stage. She speaks with an accent equally indefinably mid-Atlantic; a legacy of her time at the American university in Cairo, perhaps.
At the new royal offices — like a gleaming, turreted fortress atop Amman’s King Hussein park, site of one of the queen’s pet projects, a children’s museum — she appears in skinny white jeans, black shirt and scarlet kitten heels. Her entourage is deferential but not obsequious. She is just back from America, where she made an appearance on the Oprah Winfrey show and talked about her marriage and her passion for chocolate. Under the influence of her son, Prince Hussein she has also become a fan of Coldplay, 50 Cent and Alicia Keys. There was a huge response to her website. “People were surprised to see someone from our region talking the way I’m talking. But I’m surprised that they’re surprised,” she laughs.
I wonder what she would have made of the bookshop I examined at Heathrow while waiting for the flight to Amman; a whole section devoted to accounts of women who have suffered at Islam’s hands — Burned Alive, The Price of Honour, Forget You Had a Daughter. The queen does not pretend that honour killings et al do not happen — she has set up the Middle East’s first centre for abused children — but to concentrate on them, is, she says, to miss the bigger picture.
Women all over the region are running businesses and working as doctors, lawyers and teachers. Jordan has expanded its education service in recent years, so that 97.5% of boys and girls now go to secondary school: “It’s no longer a debate about empowerment of women, it’s about development. People have to understand that if women are not contributing to society, the whole country loses.”
Rania is a prime example of an Islamic career woman herself: before her marriage to the Sandhurst-educated Prince Abdullah, she was an investment banker with the American Citibank and in marketing for Apple. She did not expect to become queen — King Hussein changed the succession from his brother to his son on his deathbed. Being queen is “a job”, from which she has taken two, three-month periods of maternity leave for the births of Princess Salma, 5, and baby son Prince Hashem, 16 months (she also has two older children, Prince Hussein, 12, and Princess Iman, 10).
She travels widely (“though I try to make the trip as short as possible. I hate leaving the children. I feel so guilty!”) and makes it her business to be involved in all aspects of Jordanian life. Launching a project to teach children to cross the road might be followed by a speech on economics to world leaders at the G8.
She has not shied away from controversy: she will be in London this week to sign an agreement linking her charity, the Jordan River Foundation, to the NSPCC. Conservative Jordanians were horrified to hear their queen raising the subject of domestic violence and sexual abuse. “It was shocking that anyone would tackle this issue,” she says. “It was very much a taboo subject because the family unit is the central support in our society. People felt issues like this should be resolved within the family. We want to develop a culture of prevention so people see when a child is in danger, and we’ve tried to build trust so it’s not seen as an attack on any family and we can say, ‘We’re not interfering, we’re here to help’.”
Jordan’s attempts at modernisation are not helped by its geographical position, squeezed between two of the most troubled places on earth. To the west it shares a long border with Israel and the occupied territories of the West Bank. To the east is Iraq.
Rania’s own life was partly shaped by the antics of Saddam Hussein. Born in Kuwait to Palestinian parents, her family fled to Jordan along with thousands of others when Saddam invaded in 1990. She was away at university, but the incident impressed on her that big political shifts impact most on ordinary families: “People look at Iraq, they look at the number of deaths every day, but there’s the other side of the conflict that people don’t focus on and that’s the human beings affected behind these numbers. The women and children who don’t have access to education, who can’t even walk down the street without fear of being attacked. We really need to bring these human stories back into focus.”
Her involvement with charities has brought her into contact with a number of frustrated non-governmental organisations, stationed in Jordan but unable to take help into Iraq because the situation is so unstable: “It’s a shame but because the situation wasn’t addressed after the fall of the regime. You had an escalation of violence. The people have paid the price in not having access to healthcare or education or electricity.”
