Do you know Noor Al-Hussein.
She is Princess Haya's step-mother.
She is absolutely dimensional.
She has a lot attributes.
Let's talk about her.
Noor Al-Hussein was born Lisa Najeeb Halaby.
It was on 23 August 1951.
She is the fourth wife and widow of King Hussein of Jordan.
She was his queen consort from their marriage in 1978 until his death in 1999.
She is the longest-standing member of the Board of Commissioners of the International
Commission on Missing Persons.
As of 2011, she is president of the United World Colleges movement and an advocate of
the anti-nuclear weapons proliferation campaign Global Zero.
In 2015, Queen Noor received Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson Award for her public service.
Queen Noor was born to a Syrian-American family, as Lisa Najeeb Halaby in Washington, D.C.
She is the daughter of Najeeb Halaby (1915–2003) and Doris Carlquist (1918–2015).
Her father was a Navy experimental test pilot, an airline executive, and government official.
He served as an aide to the United States 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 private-sector career, serving as CEO of Pan American World Airways
from 1969 to 1972.
The Halabys had two children following Lisa; a son, Christian, and a younger daughter,
Alexa.
They divorced in 1977.
Her mother, Doris, was of Swedish descent and died on December 25, 2015 aged 97.
Noor's paternal grandfather, Najeeb Elias Halaby, a Syrian-Lebanese who was born in
Zahle, and whose parents hailed from Aleppo, was a petroleum broker, according to 1920
Census records.
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).
Najeeb Halaby died shortly afterward, and his estate was unable to continue the new
enterprise.
According to research done in 2010 for the PBS series Faces of America by Professor Henry
Louis Gates Jr., of Harvard University, her great-grandfather, Elias Halaby, came to New
York around 1891, one of the earliest Syrian immigrants to the United States.
He was a Christian as well as having been a provincial treasurer (magistrate) as stated
before by Najeeb Halaby in his autobiography "Crosswinds: an Airman's Memoir".
He left Ottoman Syria with his two eldest sons.
His wife, Almas Mallouk, and their remaining children joined him in the United States 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 around 1910 and fully assimilated into American society.
Halaby attended schools in New York and California before entering National Cathedral School
from fourth to eighth grade.
She attended the Chapin School in New York City for two years, and then went on to graduate
from Concord Academy, a private boarding school in Concord, Massachusetts.
She entered Princeton University with its first coeducational freshman class and received
an A.B. in architecture and urban planning in 1974 after completing a 37-page long senior
thesis titled "96th Street and Second Avenue."
She was also a member of the Princeton University's first women's ice hockey team.
After she graduated from Princeton, Halaby moved to Australia, where she worked for a
firm that specialized in planning new towns, with a burgeoning interest in the Middle East,
which because of Halaby's Syrian roots had special appeal.
After a year, in 1975, she accepted a job offer from Llewelyn Davies, a British architectural
and planning firm, which had been employed to design a model capital city center in Tehran,
Iran.
When increasing political instability forced the company to relocate to the UK, she traveled
to the Arab world and decided to apply to Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism
while taking a temporary aviation facility research job in Amman.
Eventually, she left Arab Air and accepted a job with Alia Airlines to become Director
of Facilities Planning and Design.
Halaby and the king became friends while he was still mourning the death of his wife.
Their friendship evolved and the couple became engaged in 1978.
... Halaby wed King Hussein on June 15, 1978,
in Amman, becoming Queen of Jordan.
Before her marriage, she accepted her husband's Sunni Islamic religion and upon the marriage,
changed her name from Lisa Halaby to the royal name Noor Al-Hussein ("Light of Hussein").
The wedding was a traditional Muslim ceremony.
Her conversion to Islam and wedding to the King of Jordan received extensive coverage
in the Western press; many assumed that she would be regarded as a stranger to the country,
since she was an American of mostly European descent who was raised in Christianity.
However, because of her Syrian grandfather, she was considered by most of the population
to be an Arab returning home rather than a foreigner.
She soon gained power and influence by using her role as King Hussein's consort and her
education in urban planning for charitable work and improvement to the country's economy,
as well as the empowerment of women in Jordanian economic life.
Noor assumed management of the royal household and three stepchildren, Princess Haya bint
Al Hussein, Prince Ali bin Al Hussein and Abir Muhaisen (her husband's children by Queen
Alia).
Noor and Hussein had four children.
They are Prince Hamzah, Prince Hashim, Princess Iman and Princess Raiyah.
Queen Noor founded the King Hussein Foundation (KHF) in 1979.
It includes the Noor Al Hussein Foundation and eight specialized development institutions:
the Jubilee Institute, the Information and Research Center, the National Music Conservatory,
the National Center for Culture and Arts and the Institute for Family Health, the Community
Development Program, Tamweelcom the Jordan Micro Credit Company and the Islamic microfinance
company, Ethmar.
She is the Honorary Chairperson of JOrchestra.
In addition, Queen Noor launched a youth initiative, the International Arab Youth Congress, in
1980.
Queen Noor's international work focuses on environmental issues and the connection to
human security with emphasis on water and ocean health.
At the 2017 Our Ocean Conference, she delivered a keynote address on the link between climate
change and ocean health with human security.
Queen Noor is Patron of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, Founding
and Emeritus President of BirdLife International, Trustee Emeritus of Conservation International,
and an Ocean Elder.
She was also chair of King Hussein Foundation International, a US non-profit 501(c)(3) which,
since 2001, has awarded the King Hussein Leadership Prize.
She is the president of the international board, the governing board of international
movement for the UWC movement.
King Hussein died on February 7, 1999 from lymphatic cancer.
After his death, his first-born son, Abdullah II, became king and Hamzah became crown prince.
In 2004, Prince Hamzah was unexpectedly stripped of his status as heir designate.
On July 2, 2009, Abdullah named his eldest son as heir-apparent to the throne, thereby
ending the previous five years' speculation over his successor.
Noor divides her time among Jordan, Washington, D.C., and the United Kingdom (in London and
at her country residence, Buckhurst Park, near Winkfield in Berkshire).
She continues to work on behalf of numerous international organizations.
She speaks Arabic, English and French.
The queen also enjoys skiing, water skiing, tennis, sailing, horseback riding, reading,
gardening and photography.
[Taken from Wikipedia]
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