Leap of
Faith: Memoirs of an Unexpected Life by Queen Noor Weidenfeld 467pp £20
Reviewed by
Avi Shlaim
The subtitle of this engaging and inspiring book is
Memoirs of an Unexpected Life. For a young American woman to marry an Arab king
was indeed unexpected but not entirely unpredicted. At a farewell dinner at a
restaurant in Tehran, an acquaintance told Lisa Halaby her fortune in the
traditional Middle Eastern way, by reading her coffee cup. He turned over the
cup, flipped it back, and studied the patterns within. “You will return to
Arabia,” he predicted. “And you will marry someone highborn, an aristocrat from
the land of your ancestors.” That man turned out to be King Hussein of Jordan.
Halaby was born into a prominent Arab-American
family. Her father, Najeeb Halaby, was a successful businessman and public
servant but a demanding individual. His relentless perfectionism could not be
reconciled with the mother’s quest for family peace, and the marriage was
dissolved. As a child Lisa was earnest and introverted, a loner by temperament,
and she was to remain impatient with gossip. Part of this social awkwardness,
she confesses, is rooted in her relationship with her father. One of the
positive results of growing up in this “moderately dysfunctional American
family” was self-reliance. Lisa joined the first freshman class at Princeton to
accept women, graduating in 1974 with a degree in architecture and urban
planning.
Leap Of Faith is the story of her remarkable journey
into Hussein’s heart and their 21 years of marriage, ending with the king’s
death in 1999. For Hussein it was evidently love at first sight. For the young,
independent-minded American woman, the courtship, over long evenings in the
palace, involved some doubts. The king was a widower with eight children from
three marriages and a reputation as a playboy. But he was an assiduous suitor
and would even sing to her. Though she was not as drawn to the Swedish group
Abba as he was, she was charmed when he would croon “Take a chance on me”.
Having accepted the royal proposition of marriage,
Lisa Halaby changed her name to Noor Al Hussein, the “Light of Hussein”. She
also converted to Islam and began in earnest to learn Arabic. The love affair
with Hussein developed into a love affair with his desert kingdom.
As well as being an intimate portrait of a marriage,
Leap Of Faith reflects a deep commitment to the people, culture and natural
beauty of Jordan. “I had found myself spellbound,” writes Noor, “by the serene
expanse of desert landscape washed golden by the retreating sun at dusk. I was
overwhelmed by an extraordinary sensation of belonging, an almost mystical
sense of peace.”
There was precious little peace, however, to be found
inside the royal palace. Noor knew she had to make some adjustments to her
environment but she found the lack of privacy irksome and unsettling. Court
officials were ubiquitous and they constantly intruded on her private space.
Over the years she came to realise that some of this dissonance was cultural - “the
difference between a Western sense of privacy and personal space and an Eastern
emphasis on communal identity and space”. This was a characteristically
charitable explanation for the conduct of the courtiers.
Noor also had to fight to carve out a meaningful role
for herself. Many in Jordan thought a queen should be a glamorous figure on a
pedestal, perhaps engaged from a distance in charity work. Noor had no
intention of being a mere figurehead and wanted to be tackling real problems.
Through the United Nations and other organisations,
Noor became involved in issues that were important to her, such as global
peacekeeping, refugee assistance and the Land Mine Ban Treaty. Most of her time
and energy, however, were taken up with work in the areas of women’s and
children’s welfare, human rights, health, education, and the environment. She
became acutely aware that all these problems, tackled in isolation by
individual ministries and charities, were fundamentally inter-related. Her
role, as she saw it, was to serve as a catalyst for consensus-building and
action. In 1985 the Noor Al Hussein Foundation was established. Its aim was to
provide strategies for sustainable development and integrating efforts to
tackle these problems in a concerted manner.
While King Hussein supported his wife’s domestic
initiatives, he himself was mainly preoccupied with foreign affairs, and more
particularly with the quest for peace in the Middle East in the aftermath of
the June 1967 war. Politics thus became a constant companion to Queen Noor
throughout the 21 years of her marriage. She is a highly sophisticated
political animal with strong liberal leanings, and a perceptive judge of
personalities.
In writing this autobiography, she relied not just on
her memory but also on a journal she kept intermittently. Her book contains
fascinating accounts of encounters with American, Arab, Palestinian and Israeli
leaders. It also sheds a great deal of light on inter-Arab relations and on the
diplomacy surrounding the Arab-Israeli conflict.
One theme that crops up again and again in Noor’s
narrative is the frustration and anger she feels in the face of American double
standards towards the Middle East. From Jordan she began to see the land of her
birth through new eyes - and the image that America projected was not a
positive one. Noor had grown up believing in America’s commitment to freedom,
justice and human rights, but she gives many examples of Washington’s failure
to uphold these principles. She complains, with justice, that America’s support
for Israel has too often been at the expense of Arab human rights and in
violation of international law and United Nations resolutions.
Throughout the 1980s Noor undertook several gruelling
speaking tours in America. The US media offered few perspectives on the Middle
East other than that of Israel. Noor was uniquely placed to educate her fellow
Americans about the problems of the region but it was an uphill struggle. The
warmest reception Hussein received in America was in 1994 when he and Itzhak
Rabin went to the White House to issue the Washington Declaration, ending the
conflict between Jordan and Israel. Members of the delegation saw first-hand
the magical hold that Israel had on the American political psyche.
On at least one issue Noor was at odds with her
husband: press freedom. The press in Jordan, though privately owned, was
effectively government-controlled. Truly independent reporting did not exist. A
combination of conservatism and insecurity made the rulers wary of allowing the
people to read dissenting opinions. By her own account, Noor’s pleas fell on
largely deaf ears. In this respect she was a bit like a lighthouse in the
desert: brilliant and illuminating but of little use to her immediate
environment.
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