Going to look at the Queen
Guess what? Today I met a real-life Queen! Queen Noor of Jordan. I suppose you would say she is the Dowager Queen, because her husband, King Hussein of Jordan, passed on of cancer (which is a better end to come to than his father, who was assassinated by his own people when he attempted to make a peace deal). So it is her step-son who is now ruling and his wife is the Queen consort.
Queen Noor is fabulous. She was giving a guest lecture up at Miami University and my friend Rachel, who was on a mission trip to Jordan this past summer, took me along last-minute. She was an excellent speaker; very poised and articulate. And beautiful! And she has a surprisingly deep voice. And no accent whatsoever; she is arab-american and was raised in the states you see. Rachel told me her story.
She was working for a Jordanian airport (doing planning, or something) when she met the King, and they became friends, and started spending time together, mainly because she could help him with his children (his previous wife had passed on) and she had no idea that he was really interested in her. So one day when she’s cooking dinner he says, “May I call your father?” which really means “ask him for your hand” in that culture. And she wasn’t even thinking about that, of course, and she says “Oh, you can call my parents any time.” And he said, “No, can I call your father.” And she said, “Oooh.” And she had to think about it. And she put him off for like a month before she said yes. So he calls up her father and her parents totally didn’t even know that they were spending time together or anything. Can you imagine if I moved to England and one day my parents got a call from Prince William saying that he wanted their blessing to marry me, without them even knowing that I had met him? That’s what it was like for her parents. If I had been them I would have bawled out the “kid” on the other end of the line for making prank phone calls and then hung up! But they didn’t do that. Of course they said yes. Now, my parents would have had issues and worried that I wouldn’t be happy being in the spotlight and under the microscope all the time; but there are big cultural differences there. Anyways, it is just like a fairy tale.
Now Queen Noor (which, by the way, means Light; when the King married her he named her Noor al Hussein, which means Light of Hussein) is really cool; she is an expert advisor to the UN, a peace advocate, an advocate for womens’ rights amongst Muslim nations, and has done so much for the educational system in Jordan. She is loved revered, practically idolized by her people, because she has done so much to help them.
And, after the lecture, we went down and got to meet her!!! I shook her hand, and I have her autograph. She is just lovely. It is kind of surreal; I met a real Queen. And she cares about the same things I care about. It kind of felt like something out the movie “The Princess Diaries.” It is so cool to me. You should have seen Rachel as we walked away; she was absolutely bouncing off the walls. Completely giddy. It was a great night.
