Queen Noor | Biography, Jordan, King Hussein, Book, & Facts (2024)

Queen Noor (born August 23, 1951, Washington, D.C., U.S.) is an American-born architect who was the consort (1978–99) of King Hussein of Jordan.

(Read Queen Noor’s Britannica essay on land mines.)

Born into a prominent Arab American family, Halaby was raised in an atmosphere of affluence. She attended the elite National Cathedral School in Washington, D.C., transferring to the exclusive Chapin School in New York City in 1965 and to the Concord Academy in Boston in 1967. In 1969 she matriculated with the first coeducational freshman class at Princeton University, where she received a bachelor’s degree in architecture and urban planning in 1975. After graduation, Halaby worked in urban design in Philadelphia, in Sydney, Australia, and in Tehrān. She first went to Jordan while working for Arab Air Services, a company partly owned by her father, and in 1977 she became director of facilities design and architecture for Alia, the Royal Jordanian Airline. It was during that time that she met the Jordanian monarch, and the two wed on June 15, 1978. Halaby took Jordanian citizenship, embraced the Islamic faith, and adopted an Arabic name.

Queen Noor undertook numerous philanthropic duties at home and abroad, many of which were concerned with children. Among the agencies she established were the Royal Endowment for Culture and Education (1979), the National Music Conservatory (1985), and the Jubilee School for gifted students (1993). In 1980 the queen convened the first annual Arab Children’s Congress, and from 1995 she was chair of the National Task Force for Children. In 1985 the Noor al-Hussein Foundation was established to consolidate the queen’s various initiatives, and, when the king died in 1999, she was entrusted with the chair of the King Hussein Foundation, the purpose of which was also to promote humanitarian interests. (Although the couple had four children, Hussein was succeeded as king by Abdullah, his eldest son, who was born in 1962 during his second marriage.) In the late 1990s she became involved in the international movement to ban antipersonnel land mines, particularly with two organizations, the Landmine Survivors Network and the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. (See also Sidebar: The Hidden Dangers of Land Mines.)

Queen Noor’s various honours included the Woodrow Wilson Award (2015) from Princeton University in recognition of her charitable work. The autobiography Leap of Faith: Memoirs of an Unexpected Life was published in 2003.