THEY make a striking and unusual couple. The king is a short, bald, rather shy man of 61 who is said in his official biographical statements to be "the 42nd generation direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad". His queen is statuesque, blonde, and American-born, more than 15 years his junior: her mother's roots are in Sweden and her father is a former US airline president.
And, indeed, when Lisa Halaby wed Hussein bin Talal in the king's mother's palace in Amman on June 15th, 1978, few people - in his court, and among her school and university friends - gave the union much chance of long-term success.
In Jordan, they noted archly that the new queen was the king's fourth wife, that two previous marriages had ended in divorce and that, barely a year earlier, the king's "one true love," the Palestinian-born Alia, had been killed in a helicopter crash. Hussein was on the rebound, it seemed, and while there was no doubting the attractiveness of his latest match, she would surely not last long in a kingdom where Americans were hardly beloved, and where women were expected to know their place - in the shadows, several steps behind their husbands.
Back in the United States, the abandoned members of the former Ms Halaby's social circle were equally sceptical. Friends and acquaintances from her childhood days in Washington and New York, and her college years at Princeton, queued up to discuss the sheer unlikeliness of the union. The picture they painted of Lisa was that of a self-confident, sharp and adventurous free spirit, a woman who demonstrated against Vietnam, once lived in a commune with eight fellow students, worked as a volunteer for Lyndon Johnson's election campaign, and quit the Princeton cheerleading squad in protest at the skimpy outfits. What was she doing hitching her future to the permanently embattled ruler of an obscure kingdom, immersing herself in Islam, destined, if her predecessors' experiences were any guide, to years of dull good work as the unobtrusive chairwoman of countless Jordanian charitable organisations?
But that was more than 18 years ago. And the unlikely couple have proved their doubters wrong. Taking the name of Noor al-Hussein (Light of Hussein) to replace Lisa, she has added fluent Arabic to her native English and student French, and added four children (sons Hamzah and Hashem; daughters Iman and Raiyah) to the nine born to her husband in his previous three marriages.
There have been hiccups along the way - chiefly in the widely-reported suggestion, about five years ago, that the king was about to divorce her and marry a former freelance CNN reporter named Rana Najjem, then employed at the royal court to provide "media expertise".
But Queen Noor survived that episode, and survived too the rise in anti-American sentiment in her adopted homeland at the time of the Gulf War in 1991, when the king sided with Iraq against the US-led coalition that ultimately forced Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. And in the last few years, the marriage has appeared stronger than ever, the first couple happily photographed hand-in-hand, the Jordanian people warming to Noor's various domestic development and health initiatives, educational projects, arts and culture activities.
THERE was always more to Lisa Halaby, of course, than the clever, confident rich girl who spent her summer holidays in Greece and the south of France, and listed her hobbies as tennis and skiing.
Her mother might well be a classic Scandinavian blonde, but Noor's father Najib is of Arab origin - his parents grew up in Syria, and moved to Lebanon before winding up in Texas where he was born. A lawyer by profession, Najib Halaby is considered one of the most successful of all Arab-Americans, serving as head of the US Civil Aviation Authority in the Kennedy era, and later as president of Pan Am.
Queen Noor's first connection with the Hashemite kingdom came via her father. He had set up a company called Arab Air and was doing business with Jordan when, in 1976, he offered her a job there. She had graduated from Princeton with a BA in architecture and urban planning, worked briefly for an architectural firm in Australia, and for another company in Iran - a British outfit hired by the Shas to plan urban renewal in Teheran - and was toying with the idea of taking a master's degree in journalism at Columbia University in New York. "There was no doubt in my mind," she said in an interview years later, about which route to take.
She made her apologies to Columbia, flew to Amman, and ended up as director of planning for Royal Jordanian Airlines.
Her first meeting with the king came in 1977 - at a ceremony marking the airline's receipt of a first jumbo jet - and a friendship rapidly intensified into romance. In May 1978, Hussein asked herb to marry him, and she consented, but only after some thought. She subsequently explained that, while she had no doubt of their love, she did wonder whether she was "the wife he needed".
Initially, she spent a good deal of her time overseas. There were unkind reports of extravagant shopping trips. But these dwindled as the years passed, and by the time of the Gulf War there was little doubting that Noor had become an asset to her husband, certainly overseas. A solo speaking tour in the US helped mitigate American criticism of his pro-Iraqi stance, Noor arguing that it was a "fallacy" to describe Jordan as an ally of Iraq, that King Hussein had simply sought "to stop the destruction of war and the loss of lives," and that "never were we aligning ourselves with one side or, another".
Immaculate in silk blouses and flowered shawls, cool and utterly self-possessed, Queen Noor today seems thoroughly reconciled to the life she chose, praising her husband for granting her a relatively independent role, unfailingly supportive of him.
She seeks nowadays, she told one interviewer, "to serve as a bridge of understanding... to try to promote dialogue ..." within her country and without. And if that sounds like a relatively modest aim for a former high-flying Princeton architecture graduate, it's no small mission for the queen of a small, conservative Islamic desert kingdom in the Middle East.