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Queen Noor is the widow of King Hussein of Jordan, who died in 1999.
She was born Lisa Najeeb Halaby in Washington, D.C. Her father,
Najeeb Halaby, served as head of the Federal Aviation Administration
under John F. Kennedy and was the CEO of Pan American World Airways
from 1969 to 1972.
She attended private schools and was a member of the first
coeducational class at Princeton University, graduating in 1974 with
a degree in architecture and urban planning. After working in
Australia, she joined a British architectural firm commissioned to
redesign Tehran, Iran. She moved back to the United States and
considered a career in journalism and television production. About
the same time, her father had been hired by the Jordanian government
to relaunch its national airline, and she accepted his offer to
become director of facilities planning and design. By 1977, she’d
had several casual encounters with the king, whose wife, Alia, had
died in a helicopter crash earlier that year. Halaby and the king
began seeing each other – initially as tentative friends, but their
friendship quickly evolved into a romance. They were married in
1978.
Throughout her marriage and continuing after her husband’s death
from cancer, Queen Noor has devoted her energies to a wide spectrum
of humanitarian efforts. In Jordan and throughout the Arab world,
she has focused on education, sustainable economic development, and
human rights initiatives. She chairs the Noor Al Hussein Foundation,
whose pioneering programs for poverty eradication, women’s
empowerment, microfinance, health, and environmental conservation
have become paradigms for the developing world. She also chairs the
King Hussein Foundation and the King Hussein Foundation
International, which promote education and leadership to enhance
understanding and respect across conflict lines. She is an
internationally recognized leader in the advocacy of worldwide land
mine bans, the rights of refugees and displaced people, and conflict
resolution through the recovery of missing persons. She is also a
founding leader of Global Zero, which seeks to eliminate nuclear
weapons; president of United World Colleges; and a board member of
the Aspen Institute and Refugees International, to name a few.
Editor in Chief John Rezek talked with Queen Noor in June. He
reports:
Queen Noor returned to her suite at the Westin Hotel from the Centre
Bell in Montréal, Québec, Canada, where she had just addressed a
plenary session at the RI Convention to a rousing reception.
I was ushered into the room where her assistant was coiling cords
and packing up computer equipment. Her Majesty entered, immediately
offering her hand, as I introduced myself. She is tall, well
postured, full maned, and unmistakably regal. She might disagree
with everything except the tall part.
We settled into our conversation. She spoke with passion, irony,
restraint, and openness. She was quick to smile and laugh – and
quick, too, to return to seriousness. It was when she was discussing
the Wye River conference, in which her husband interrupted his
treatment at the Mayo Clinic to offer his counsel to U.S. President
Bill Clinton, that she spoke more slowly and her brilliant blue eyes
took on an additional glisten.
We talked for longer than we had planned, Her Majesty allowing that
“I haven’t done an interview like this in a long time – like having
a discussion with a friend.”
Well into the conversation, she asked if I’d like some water and got
up, brought over two wine glasses from an adjacent table, and
poured. She chastised herself for allowing some drops to hit the
glass base and substituted her glass for the one she poured for me.
“I’m rusty from my waitress days.”
The Rotarian:
You have an enormous range of advocacy involvement, and I know that
you have a strong belief in the efficacy of partnerships. What are
the specific successes and challenges inherent in having such a
general portfolio of issues? Queen Noor: There are enormous challenges in addressing a range of issues, especially the kinds that I’m involved with, because I live in one of the most challenged and challenging regions of the world. First, it takes a lot of time and energy to study, learn, listen, and then find the right people to collaborate with. I’m a collaborative type of leader. I like teamwork. You get your best ideas and results by integrating different perspectives. That’s how my work in Jordan and the Noor Al Hussein Foundation became so diverse. I had worked in Jordan for a few years before my marriage, worked in Iran, and traveled throughout the Arab world, so I had some understanding of the region, but I still was very humble about how much I had yet to learn. I began to try to identify gaps in both private- and public-sector initiatives so that I wouldn’t be replicating what was already underway. I wanted to fill gaps. Most areas had traditionally been approached with a siloed mentality, and I wondered, if we integrated issues, whether we might be able to devise more efficient and economical programs to address these challenges. So I began with a broad range of goals.
The Noor Al Hussein Foundation was established to make more
efficient use of manpower and limited resources. It’s terribly
important to work, as Rotary does, in a coalition-building,
collaborative way that recognizes that when you’re addressing
fundamental development issues, especially in the poorer parts of
the world, you cannot look at women’s issues in isolation from
children’s issues, poverty issues, even environmental, health, and
education issues. In Jordan, we pioneered programs that focused on
women’s health and welfare, education of their families, and that
enabled these women to contribute to the economic life of their
families. The women would no longer be viewed as charity recipients,
but as self-reliant. Today our microfinance company has been ranked
No. 1 in the Middle East and North Africa, not because it’s huge,
but because we have integrated health, education, and family needs
into the programs that have helped women entrepreneurs with
microlending support. This has enabled the entire process to become
much more sustainable.
TR:
Are women particularly good agents of stability?
Queen Noor:
They’re the essential agents, really, along with security. If you
don’t have fundamental security, it’s impossible for almost anything
to take off. Women in many parts of the world are special targets,
even if you have a relative degree of stability. If women aren’t
safe from abuse from soldiers, from peacekeepers, from other members
of their communities and families, it’s very hard for them to play
the role that those communities need. Women hold the key. It’s not
only that they’re the key to development: You educate a woman, and
you educate an entire family. I have seen women who become
economically productive through increasing their knowledge and
understanding. Even if their education was minimal to begin with,
they’ve had an impact on the men and the larger community. Also,
we’ve seen women in many parts of the world play critical
peacemaking and peace-building roles, from Ireland to Rwanda, in the
Middle East and Latin America. There are many examples of women
who’ve been able to bring to a conflict a perspective that is longer
term and more family and community oriented than that of male
politicians, who have traditionally dominated the process.
TR:
Your humanitarian efforts are sparked by your curiosity and empathy.
Are you personally more interested in one issue at a time? Are they
like children – you love them all, but some demand special attention
at special times?
Queen Noor:
For me it’s a big-picture passion and commitment, born out of living
in a region that has endured so much conflict and human suffering. I
try to build stable, hopeful communities through all the different
components of my work. That is the overriding passion. It doesn’t
exclude anything – it includes all of it because it all is
interconnected.
TR:
Are there any truly lost causes?
Queen Noor:
There are many people who will say that peace between Israelis and
Palestinians, peace between Israelis and Arabs, or between Jews and
Muslims and Christians, is impossible. But people who assume that
don’t understand the people of our region. I have worked with
Israelis, Palestinians, and Jordanians, and a multitude of people
from other Arab countries. I’ve also seen some of the worst carnage
in the former Yugoslavia. I’ve seen the depths of man’s inhumanity
toward man, but I’ve also seen women and men sitting around a table,
across from those who may have been responsible for the brutality of
their own losses, trying to come to some sort of understanding about
their common future. In the Middle East, I’m absolutely convinced,
from firsthand knowledge, that the majority of Israelis and
Palestinians have everything they need to achieve peace. The
politicians stand in the way, but the people are the ones who have
to sustain any kind of peace, and they fundamentally understand,
accept, and are willing to support what would enable all these
communities to live in peace. So I disagree with those who think
that it’s written in the DNA of the people of the Middle East that
they can never live in peace. On the contrary, there’s far more in
the DNA that binds them, in terms of what they’re willing to give to
live in peace with their neighbors, than divides them. The sense of
hopelessness and lost cause comes from the propaganda of
politicians.
TR:
If you were to give a short course in how to deal with political
unhelpfulness, what would it cover?
Queen Noor:
Political irrationality. My husband is who you should be sitting
with right now for that answer. He led Jordan for 47 years, and he
led from his heart as well as his head. He really loved his country,
and he understood that no Jordanians would live in peace and
security unless their neighbors were living in peace and security.
Just before his death, when he was in the United States fighting
cancer at the Mayo Clinic, President Clinton called him and spoke to
him about the stalemate between the Israelis and Palestinians at the
Wye River conference in 1998. My husband ended up going, and it was
an excruciating process. He was ex-hausted by the chemo, and the
talks were dragging on. On the last evening, everybody was
threatening to leave – as political posturing and because of a
genuine lack of confidence in one another. Basically, he addressed
them as though he were addressing squabbling children. He said
there’s been enough quarreling, enough fighting, enough suffering.
Think about your children and their children and about the legacy
you’re leaving. Your actions have an impact on whether there will be
a future of hope and opportunity for all your children. He pointed
out some basic truths, and even if people disagreed with him, they
had to respect him for his integrity and for his principles. He
broke the stalemate, and there was an agreement signed at the White
House.
TR:
Your humanitarian work involves both impatience and patience. We
don’t have to learn impatience. What are the keys to learning
constructive patience?
Queen Noor:
Well, you learn it quickly when you realize nothing happens
overnight in humanitarian work. I’m talking from my own experience
in Jordan, where I introduced some different ways of looking at the
role of women. No one may have ever indicated to these women what
they were able to do, or perhaps they never had the confidence or
encouragement to look within themselves, at their own capabilities.
TR:
In your book, Leap of Faith, you mention one husband seeing his wife
prosper, and responding by saying he wants an additional one.
Queen Noor:
I know. Thank God we don’t come across that too much. In one of our
programs in the Bedouin community, we started working with Save the
Children, and we integrated health, education, and income generation
for the women using traditional weaving. The craft was dying out,
and we helped a new generation understand that this could become a
livelihood for them. I had seen people try to impose Western ideas
on other cultures, and I was determined not to do that. We have
within our culture a protective safety net. In Jordan, we have lower
rates of crime and delinquency because we have an intact family
network. That is a great asset, and the women are central to that.
So in trying to provide opportunities for women, it was very
important to ensure that the women could work in a way that would
not disrupt their family responsibilities.
TR:
Does altruism run in families? Is there an altruism gene?
Queen Noor:
That’s a good question. There’s so much yet to understand about
genetics, there could well be. Is compassion a fundamental human
trait? There are those who will say that children demonstrate
compassion instinctively at certain stages. That’s what I believe,
and I have seen compassion among those who have suffered the most,
and compassion directed toward those who are associated with the
source of the suffering. But the people who grow up in conflict
situations have to work harder to overcome the very natural sense of
injury, grievance, anger, and pain in order to empathize with
others. All of our faiths emphasize compassion, emphasize empathy
through the golden rule or the rule of reciprocity.
TR:
You have a remarkable resilience. What do you keep in mind to forge
ahead, and what do you say to those who are discouraged and
considering giving up?
Queen Noor:
First of all, getting discouraged is very human. Everybody has those
moments. This may not be of help to anyone else, but I often think
about my husband, who saw the best and the worst in people. He was
subjected to many assassination attempts in his unrelenting efforts
to achieve peace and to resolve different conflicts in our region.
He faced so many obstacles that were unnecessary – human obstacles –
and he never lost his faith in anyone. He never became cynical; he
never stopped believing. He was a devout Muslim and a descendant of
the Prophet Muhammad, and he took that very seriously – to try to
live as true to the teachings of the faith that his family had
played such a part in bringing to the world. And he never stopped
believing in his ability to play a constructive role. When
everything looks insurmountable to my children, I remind them of
their father’s example, because he was such a force and inspiration
for them. Then I throw myself into my work. When we are tempted to
feel sorry for ourselves or feel that we are facing insurmountable
barriers, there’s always something we
can do for someone else in
need. There’s always some way we can serve, and there’s no more
fulfilling path to happiness. There’s no more enriching path in life
than service.
TR:
There are people who say they want to spend more time serving others
but believe they don’t have the time or resources for it. How can
you convince them otherwise?
Queen Noor:
It starts for everyone at home, in your personal interactions with
your family, with your friends, with people you meet, with strangers
on the street. It starts with cultivating a generosity of spirit,
and it can start with a smile – just brightening someone’s day by
giving of your heart to people you encounter, no matter how dire
your circumstances. Even if you have no material resources to offer,
you always have your heart and the light of your eyes, the light of
your soul. For those of us who are fortunate enough to have access
to all these new technological platforms, there’s a multitude of
ways
for people to connect. Organizations such as Rotary develop
connections within their communities or nations around a common
cause. The possibilities are limitless now for individual and
collective engagement. I think any human being
has the ability to
have a profound impact on others, and through others, on the larger
world.
TR:
Which humanitarian issues do you think the media overlook the most? |
The
Rotarian Conversation: Queen Noor