And while she occasionally acknowledges her domestic difficulties, Noor is careful not to allow personal problems to become any more than asides. Her own activities developing village-based economic self-sufficiency projects and improving Jordan's medical, educational and cultural facilities take second place to her husband's struggles on the world stage. Noor details Hussein's struggles to create Arab unity and his vision of peaceful coexistence with Israel. There are meetings with Arafat, Saddam Hussein, American presidents and other leaders. From this point on, her story is mostly his, mainly covering his attempts to broker peace in the Middle East. The rumor mills buzzed: was she the next Grace Kelly? Before long, the king renamed her Noor (light in Arabic), and she converted to Islam. Her father's aviation business produced a chance meeting with King Hussein in 1976, and a year or two later Noor realized the king was courting her. Born in America in 1951 as Lisa Halaby, Noor came from a wealthy, well-connected family and was part of Princeton's first co-ed class. ("I urged everyone I worked with to speak freely and offer honest, constructive criticism.") On the other, it is a fiery account of her husband's frustrations in dealing with international diplomacy in general and the United States and Israel in particular.Īnyone who loved The King and I will readily warm to the love story of Queen Noor and the late King Hussein of Jordan.
On one hand, this is a glossy and decorous account of the queen's unusual experiences, with a polite tendency to accentuate the positive. Leap of Faith will not dispel its author's impression that she has often been misunderstood.
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