Queen Noor

Lisa Najeeb Halaby was born in 1951 to Najeeb and Doris Halaby in California. Growing up she spent a lot of time with her paternal grandmother. Her family moved to Washington in the early 1960s because her father had been created the director of the FAA under President Kennedy. Later Najeeb became the second director of PAN-AM and the family spent a lot of time traveling places because it was free. During this time Lisa went to a school that she did not like because it did not let her be who she wanted to be. She then transferred to another school that was more suited to her style and then went on to Princeton. Halfway through she took some time off to travel in the United States, but went back to get her masters in Urban Planning. After she graduated in the mid 1970s she went to Australia where she worked for a company based partly in the middle East. She was then transferred to the middle east and fell in love with it because of her middle-eastern descent. Because her father was the president of PAN-AM he knew famous people and during a tour of the middle east had Lisa meet King Hussein of Jordan. Nothing happened at first, but several months later he invited her to his castle for lunch and to meet the children of his last wife that had died in a helicopter accident. They soon fell in love and got married. Lisa became a muslim and Hussein gave her the title of Queen Noor meaning light in Arabic. Noor and Hussein eventually added to his 8 children with four of their own. Their marriage was not perfect, they had many trials and hardships dealing with everything going on in the middle east at the time, but they were happy and they loved each other. Then in the mid to late 1990s Hussein found out that he had cancer. They tried to cure him, but in February of 1999 he died. Noor was heartbroken, but things were to get worse. There was a power struggle between her and her step-son Abdullah because as his father's eldest male heir, he thought he should be King, but Noor wanted her eldest son Hamzah to be king. Eventually Abdullah became King. Noor now spends her time between Jordan, London and New York spending time with her children and her siblings as well as many charitable organizations that she has in Jordan.