Regarding Rania

Officials close to the Queen say that the setbacks in parliament have taught her not to expect overnight success. "My disappointments," Rania says, "have stemmed mainly from my own impatience. [Reform] requires changes from within society. If society still believes that a woman's place is in the home, you are not going to get change." Even so, she is adamant that "now is the time to confront these issues."

She has already witnessed plenty of change. Rania al Yasin was born in Kuwait in August 1970, only a few days before Jordan's bloody Black September civil war, when Palestinian guerrillas tried to overthrow her future father-in-law. Her family remained in Kuwait until Saddam Hussein invaded the tiny oil sheikdom in 1990. The Yasins left and never went back. Rania earned a business degree from the American University in Cairo before joining her parents in Amman in 1991. She worked in marketing, first for Citibank, then for Apple. She caught the eye of Abdullah, oldest son of King Hussein and commander of Jordan's special forces, at a dinner party in 1992 and they married the following year.

She was not expected to become Queen. Hussein's deathbed decision to sack his brother Hassan, Crown Prince for 34 years, and make Abdullah his heir caught Rania — and all of Jordan — by surprise. "A whole new life and responsibility was suddenly placed on my shoulders," she recalls. "You start feeling insecure. You feel you have to prove yourself."

The conventional role of the Arab consort would have required her to confine herself to the raising of their children, Hussein and Iman, then aged 4 and 2 (their third, Salma, was born in 2000). Instead, the King asked her to brainstorm initiatives on human rights, women's rights, children's rights, education and health. Rania set up a separate office which now has a staff of 20, including researchers, speechwriters, schedulers and publicists, for the most part worldly young Jordanian women like herself. Although she rarely states her political positions in public, Abdullah says he frequently asks for her advice. "I come home at night, and I have a problem with education or health, and I need somebody to pick my brain," he says. "I'm so busy with everything else I need somebody to raise the flag, and in all the issues she is involved in she has been very successful in doing that."

If her pillow talk with Abdullah was political, Rania's early public profile was predictably centered on her looks and her wardrobe. There were comparisons to Jacqueline Kennedy and Diana, Princess of Wales, and she became a favorite of celebrity interviewers, gossip columnists, fashion magazines and paparazzi on both sides of the Atlantic. Inevitably, this led to criticism from Amman's salon society, where her fondness for designer dresses and expensive European vacations is viewed as inappropriate for a poor country squeezed between the conflicts in Palestine and Iraq. The gossips call her "the handbag Queen," and even serious commentators grumble about palace over-spending — including on Rania's Challenger jet. She calls the criticism "part of the turf," but adds: "If the gossip gets out of hand, I may have to look at myself and ask, Am I doing something wrong?"

That Challenger, incidentally, gets a lot of use: the Queen travels frequently, often to the West, where her glamorous persona elicits raves rather than criticism. She's also learned to use her celebrity to do some big-league networking. Shortly after Abdullah's coronation, she agreed to become a spokeswoman for the global microfinance movement, which seeks to empower Third World women by providing them with small business loans. She has since traveled the globe promoting the Washington-based Foundation of International Community Assistance, holding power lunches with women in Washington and Hollywood and delivering aid to women in battle zones like Kosovo. "Working with us in the trenches, you feel like she is one of our own from the ngo world," says finca policy director Lawrence Yanovitch. Bill Clinton recalls how at a charity event in Dubai she lassoed him into doing another in Jordan. "I needed another involvement like I needed a hole in the head," the former President told TIME. "But before I knew it, she had talked me into helping."

She fractured her leg last month while exercising, forcing her to miss the WEF's annual meeting in Davos. But she recalls the first time that she attended a meeting as the Forum's newest board member. Some of the titans of global business, nearly all of them men, were arrayed around the table. "I was terrified!" she says. She need not have been. At the meeting, recalls WEF president Klaus Schwab, the board found itself evenly divided on a controversial appointment until Rania, who had listened silently, raised some pointed questions that quickly clarified the best course of action. "The world's best CEOs hadn't thought of them," Schwab says. "It was her intuitive intelligence." These days, Rania is entirely at home in a room full of movers and shakers. When she was invited to address the pre-Davos Jidda Economic Forum in Saudi Arabia — where discrimination against women is so pervasive that they are barred from most occupations — she accepted enthusiastically. Aboard the Challenger on her way home from another address in Geneva, she and her aides discussed the speech she would deliver in Jidda. "They want me to talk about corporate responsibility, but that's a little passé," the Queen said slyly. "I'll try to talk about something a little more relevant." When the day came, she went to the podium wearing a white head scarf, a courteous nod to Saudi sensitivities. But her message was blunt: it was time her Arab sisters and brothers did it for themselves. "We must face up to hard truths," she said. "It will not help to wring our hands, point fingers or clench our fists. First, we must all participate." For women across the Arab world, it was a call to action from one of their own.