Queen’s gambit

Rania of Jordan’s glamour and eloquence have won her celebrity friends in the West – and comparisons to Marie Antoinette at home

Amman, Jordan

To the western world, she is the closest the 21st century gets to Princess Diana: glamorous, beautiful, charitable and royal. But to many of her citizens, she is extravagant, meddling and possibly even corrupt. She describes herself on Twitter as ‘a mum and a wife with a really cool day job…’ So which is the real Queen Rania? As the Arab spring spread across Jordan, I took a trip to Amman to find out.

The 40-year-old Palestinian never expected to be Queen of Jordan. She was born and brought up in Kuwait; her father, a doctor, was first-generation middle-class. Rania went to university in Cairo and her family moved to Jordan after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. She met her husband, now King Abdullah II, at a dinner party, but he was not even Crown Prince when they married a few months later. His father, King Hussein, only nominated Abdullah to take over the throne on his deathbed, 12 years ago.

Rania had worked in marketing for Citibank and Apple and spoke perfect English. When she became queen she threw herself into selling Jordan to the West. It wasn’t long before she was appearing on the Oprah Winfrey Show, sitting on the board of the World Economic Forum in Davos and building up a network of mega-rich celebrity friends.

To Americans, this was a revelation. A Muslim woman could be as glamorous as a western one! She was intelligent and modern and spoke up for the rights of women. Maybe the Middle East wasn’t so barbaric after all.

This was Queen Rania’s mission: to bridge the growing gulf between East and West; to prove that Muslim countries could be moderate. But what she hadn’t bargained for was the modern, global media.