Her majesty Rania Al Abdullah on refugees in Jordan, Isis and being a Muslim woman today
On Twitter (6.5m followers) she describes herself as ‘a mum and a wife with a really cool day job’. That job is being queen, and she looks the part. Her Instagram (3.2m followers) often resembles a fashion shoot, with occasional family shots. But among the Instagram photos are also less glamorous snaps of her appearing amid crying women in headscarves and grief-stricken children. For her majesty Rania Al Abdullah, 46, lives in a kingdom surrounded by war. Jordan shares borders with Syria, Iraq and Israel/Palestine. Unlike some of its oil-rich neighbours, it is a poor country, but it is offering a lesson to the world by taking in more refugees than the whole of Europe; Unicef estimates that one in four of its inhabitants is a refugee.
As she walks into the reception room at the Al Husseiniya Palace in Jordan’s capital, Amman, where she and the king have their offices, she is wearing towering, cobalt-blue heels, the backs encrusted with diamantés. She is arguably the world’s highest-profile Arab woman, a platform she uses as an outspoken advocate for refugees and for a more compassionate world in the time of Brexit and US President Donald Trump.
It was at a dinner party in 1993 that she met the then Prince Abdullah, eldest son of King Hussein, and fell in love with his ‘great smile’ and ‘infectious energy’. Six months later, they were married. Unexpectedly, Abdullah was named heir instead of his uncle Hassan, and Rania suddenly found herself to be the world’s youngest queen at 28.
‘It was extremely difficult – not least as I wasn’t expecting it, so I wasn’t prepared for it,’ she says. ‘From day one, it’s been one challenge after another. We had 9/11, the war in Iraq and the refugees that came in then, the intifadas [uprisings] in Gaza, the wars in Lebanon and Syria and more refugees, so it’s really been a challenge.’
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