Thursday, Oct. 26, 2006

Queen Rania

By SCOTT MACLEOD

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.