http://www.ratinghq.comRatinghq Category Comments Feed for SocietyRatingHQ (http://www.ratinghq.com)enQueen Noor Al Hussein (born August 23, 1951 in Washington, D.C.) is the fourth wife and widow of the late King Hussein of Jordan. As the late king's widow, Queen Noor is a dowager queen of Jordan. She was born an American of English, Swedish, Scottish, and Syrian descent. She is the current president of the United World Colleges movement. Queen Noor was born Lisa Najeeb Halaby. She is the daughter of Najeeb Halaby, a former CEO of Pan-American World Airways, one time head of the Federal Aviation Administration, and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, and his first wife, Doris Carlquist. She has a younger brother, Christian Halaby, a composer and guitarist, and a younger sister, Alexa Halaby (a University of Pennsylvania squash champion who was a bridesmaid at the 1986 wedding of Maria Owings Shriver and Arnold Schwarzenegger). Queen Noor's paternal grandfather, Najeeb Elias Halaby, a Syrian immigrant, was an oil 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). Halaby died shortly afterward, and his estate was unable to continue the new enterprise.http://www.ratinghq.com/5-904/queen-noor-al-hussein.html2008-09-12 05:53:51