Queen Rania Al-Abdullah of Jordan listened Wednesday morning to students at Taft High School in Woodland Hills chronicle their attempts at bridging multicultural gaps in their diverse student body. They talked of their organizations, their successes, their personal stories.
Then, microphone in hand, she sat on stage and, without so much as a note card, praised their various programs by name. The strife-torn Middle East could use a few of them, she mused.
"In my opinion, people who don't see eye to eye are standing with their backs to each other," Rania said.
"Ooohh," murmured the crowd.
"So you have to start with turning them around to face each other."
In the modern-day annals of royalty, women tend to fall into the category of the stately, matriarchal Queen Elizabeth or the paparazzi-hounded Diana, Princess of Wales.
Now Rania, the well-educated, multilingual wife of King Abdullah II of Jordan, is crafting a new sort of image. At 37, Rania chairs a variety of non-government organizations working on education and women's issues, as well as a micro-lending initiative, and has a website detailing it all.
She travels Jordan and the rest of the world speaking on issues that concern women, education and international relations. It's not unusual for royals to have portfolios thick with nonprofit deeds. And, to be sure, Rania owes something to her predecessor, Queen Noor al Hussein, the widow of the late King Hussein, Abdullah's father. Noor, too, is beautiful and versed in foreign policy. (The two women keep in touch by e-mail.)
But Noor is an American. Rania, born in Kuwait of a Palestinian father, is an Arab woman, a practicing Muslim on a mission to show the rest of the world that Arabs, particularly women -- "Muslim women are the biggest victims of stereotypes," she says -- are not the oppressed, terrorist-supporting, American haters that some people think they are.
In a day and a half of visits in Los Angeles, she moved with ease from the California Governor and First Lady's Conference on Women on Tuesday afternoon to a Q&A with Arianna Huffington that evening before an audience at Creative Artists Agency, and on to the Wednesday meeting with Taft students.
Although her messages were always about dispelling stereotypes and promoting multiculturalism, she subtly shifted argot for each appearance. She got a laugh when she said to a crowd of 14,000 gathered at the Long Beach Convention Center for the women's conference: "To hear some in the West, all Arab women are backward and oppressed -- while some Arabs assume all American women are desperate housewives seeking sex in the city."
