Queen Noor of Jordan

Queen Noor of Jordan (Arabic: الملكة نور‎; born 23 August 1951) is the last wife and widow of King Hussein of Jordan. She was queen consort of Jordan during her marriage (1978–1999) and has been queen dowager of Jordan since her husband's death in 1999.

She is an American, born of Syrian[1], British and Swedish descent. She is the current president of the United World Colleges movement and an advocate of the anti-nuclear weapons proliferation campaign, Global Zero.
Family and early life
Noor was born Lisa Najeeb Halaby in Washington, D.C. She is the daughter of Najeeb Halaby and Doris Carlquist. Her father was an aviator, airline executive and government official. He served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Truman administration, before being appointed by John F. Kennedy to head the Federal Aviation Administration. Najeeb Halaby also had a successful private-sector career, serving as CEO of Pan American World Airways from 1969 to 1972. The Halabys had two children in addition to Lisa: a son, Christian, and another daughter, Alexa. They divorced in 1977.

Noor's paternal grandfather, Najeeb Elias Halaby, a Syrian immigrant of Lebanese origin, was a petroleum broker, according to 1920 Census records.[2] Merchant Stanley Marcus, however, recalled that in the mid-1920s, Halaby opened Halaby Galleries, a rug boutique and interior-decorating shop, at Neiman-Marcus in Dallas, Texas, and ran it with his Texas-born wife, Laura Wilkins (1889–1987, later Mrs. Urban B. Koen). Halaby died shortly afterward, and his estate was unable to continue the new enterprise.[3]

According to research done by Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., of Harvard University, in 2010 for the PBS series Faces of America, her great-grandfather, Elias Halaby, came to New York around 1891, one of the earliest Syrian immigrants to the United States. He had been a Christian and provincial treasurer (magistrate) in the Ottoman Empire. He left Syria with his two eldest sons. His wife Almas and remaining children joined him in the USA in 1894. He died three years later, leaving his teenage sons, Habib, and Najeeb (her paternal grandfather), to run his import business. Najeeb moved to Dallas, Texas around 1910 and fully assimilated into American society.[1]

[edit] Education
Lisa Halaby was born, raised and educated in the United States. She attended National Cathedral School from fourth to eighth grade. She briefly attended The Chapin School in Manhattan, then went on to Concord Academy in Massachusetts. She entered Princeton University with its first coeducational freshman class, and received a BA in Architecture and Urban Planning in 1974.[4]

[edit] Career
After she graduated, Halaby moved to Australia, where she worked for a firm that specialized in planning new towns. She became increasingly interested in Middle East and immediately accepted a job offer from a British architectural firm that had been employed to redesign the city of Tehran.[5]

In 1976, Halaby moved back to the United States. She thought about taking master's degree in journalism and starting a career in television production. However, she accepted a job offer from her father, who was commissioned by the Jordanian government to redesign their airlines. She became Director of Facilities Planning and Design of the airline he founded.[5]

In 1977, Halaby, who attended various high-profile social events as the Director of Facilities Planning and Design, met King Hussein of Jordan for the first time on the development of the Queen Alia International Airport. The airport was named after Queen Alia, King Hussein's third wife, who died in a helicopter crash the same year. Halaby became a friend of the King, who was still mourning after the death of his wife. Their friendship evolved into romance and the pair became engaged in 1978.[5]

[edit] Marriage and children