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The feminist queen of the Middle East

World leaders rush to pay tribute to King Hussein, but his widow, Queen Noor, deserves much of the credit for Jordan's transformation from police state to cradle of political freedom.

BY GERALDINE BROOKS | The obituaries were praising him even before he died: King Hussein, the Arableader who made a modern nation from an impoverished patch of desert, whoturned a warrior's bravery into the courage of a peacemaker.

It isn't so surprising that these emotive eulogies have poured from thepens of usually hard-bitten journalists. The king was an unfailinglycourteous man -- accessible, open and direct in a region whose leaders typically are secretive, remote and dishonest.

But most of these tributes breezed over the one remarkable thing hedid that may have influenced the style of modern Jordan more than any otherpeacetime decision.

In 1978, King Hussein married Noor al-Hussein, the former Lisa Halaby, aWashington, D.C.-born architecture graduate who was working in Amman on aredesign of Jordan's national airline. In doing so, he gave a conservativeMuslim nation a most extraordinary queen: a liberal, feminist professionalfrom a frankly political family of prominent U.S. Democrats who had protestedthe war in Vietnam and blazed a trail for women at Princeton as a member ofthe university's first coed class. At 26, she was 17 years younger than theking, who had already divorced two wives and lost the third in a helicoptercrash.

She was also beautiful. Distractingly beautiful. And perhaps that was onereason so many people, in Jordan and outside the country, failed to understandher significance.

I first traveled to Amman in December 1987, a few weeks after thePalestinian intifada had erupted in Israel -- just across the depleted tricklethat is all that remains of the mighty Biblical river from which Jordan takesits name. In that raw, angry winter, it was by no means clear that Jordan wasthe most modern, most democracy-prone, most peace-loving nation in the ArabMiddle East. In fact, that winter, Jordan looked a lot like the police states that surrounded it -- the nasty triumvirate of Iraq, Syria and SaudiArabia.

Foreign journalists were being deported, local ones having their presscards (i.e., meal tickets) yanked. A secret-police escort was mandatory inorder to visit a Palestinian refugee camp. The information minister told me that, in his opinion, a model regional newspaper was the fawningly sycophantic,completely censored daily published under the thumb of Saddam Hussein inneighboring Iraq. At that time, the king's appointed prime minister was ZaidRifai, an astute diplomat but unabashed elitist who thought the ordinarypeople of Jordan were ignorant riffraff, not to be trusted with the slightesthint of a political voice, much less a vote.

N E X T_ P A G E: A behind-the-scenes power struggle

 
PHOTOGRAPH: AP/WIDE-WORLD