
Noor was the eldest of four children. Her father Hazrat Inayat Khan came from a princely Muslim Indian family (he was a great-grandson of Tipu Sultan, the famous eighteenth century ruler of Mysore) and lived in Europe as a musician and a teacher of Sufism; her mother Ora Meena Ray Baker Noor was an American from Albuquerque, New Mexico, who had met Inayat Khan during his travels in the United States.
Inayat Khan, Noor's father, took his family to pre-revolutionary Russia, where they were taken up by members of the Imperial Court and where a daughter was born in the Kremlin on New Year's Day, 1914.
She was given the name Noor, meaning 'light of womanhood', and would be known by her father's name, the patronymic Inayat, and the title Khan, an honorific denoting aristocratic birth.
When Noor was 13 her father died, leaving her, as the oldest child, the mainstay of her grieving mother and younger siblings. On leaving school Noor studied music for six years, composing for the harp and piano, and little by little becoming more European and less oriental in her habits and dress. She moved about more independently than the veiled women of the tradition out of which she had come. She wore make-up that made her skin lighter.
She took a degree at the Sorbonne in child psychology, studied several modern languages, travelled on the Continent with her brother Vilayat, and began a career as a freelance writer. She became a frequent contributor of articles and stories to newspapers and magazines and her children's fairy tales were broadcast by Radiodiffusion Francaise. A book of her stories was published in England in 1939 and she was about to bring out a childrens newspaper in Paris when war broke out.

Although Noor Inayat Khan was deeply influenced by the pacifist teachings of her father, she decided to help defeat Nazi tyranny. So on 19 November 1940 she joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF), to be trained as a wireless operator. Two years later she was recruited to join F (France) Section of the Special Operations Executive and in early February 1943 she was posted to the Air Ministry, Directorate of Air Intelligence, seconded to First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY), and sent to Wanborough Manor, near Guildford in Surrey[2], from there to various other SOE schools for training, including STS 5 Winterfold, STS 36 Boarmans and STS 52 Thame Park. Despite not completing her training and the mixed opinions about the suitability of her temperament for the task, her fluency in French and competency in wireless operation made her the strongest candidate in response to the urgent Parisian request for further help.
On 16/17 June 1943, cryptonymed 'Madeleine'/W/T operator 'Nurse', Assistant Section Officer Inayat Khan was flown to landing ground B/20A 'Indigestion' in Northern France on a night landing double Lysander operation, code named Teacher/Nurse/Chaplain/Monk. She traveled to Paris, and together with two other women (Diana Rowden, code named Paulette/Chaplain, and Cecily Lefort, code named Alice/Teacher) joined the Physician network led by Francis Suttill, code named Prosper. Over the next month and a half, all other Physician network radio operators were arrested by the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), but in spite of the danger and rejecting an offer to return to Britain, Noor chose to remain and continue transmitting as the last essential link between London and Paris. Moving from place to place, she tried to escape capture while maintaining wireless communication with London. "She refused to abandon what had become the most important and dangerous post in France and did excellent work." It is mainly attributed to her efforts that the Physician network could be reconstructed.

After refusing to sign a declaration not to make further flight attempts, Inayat Khan was taken to Germany on 27 November 1943 "for safe custody" and imprisoned at Pforzheim in solitary confinement as a so-called Nacht und Nebel-prisoner, i.e. without any contact with the outside world and in complete secrecy. She was classified as 'highly dangerous' and shackled in chains most of the time. As the prison director testified after the war, Inayat Khan remained uncooperative and continued to refuse to give any information on her work or her fellow operatives.
On 11 September 1944, Noor Inayat Khan and three other SOE agents from Karlsruhe prison, Yolande Beekman, Eliane Plewman and Madeleine Damerment, were moved to the Dachau Concentration Camp. In the early hours of the morning, 13 September 1944, the four women were executed by a shot to the head. An anonymous Dutch prisoner emerging in 1958 contended that Noor Inayat Khan was cruelly beaten by the sadistic SS guard Wilhelm Ruppert before being shot. Her last word was "Liberté".
Noor Inayat Khan was posthumously awarded a British mention in dispatches and a French Croix de Guerre with Gold Star. Khan was the third of three World War II FANY members to be awarded the George Cross, Britain's highest award for gallantry not on the battle field.
(Pictures Courtesy : www.bbc.co.uk)
1 comment:
There's been resurgent interest in Noor of late, including the biography by Shrabani Basu, and some talk of a film. I recently completed a CD's worth of music inspired by her life; you can find more details here at www.noorcd.com, and indeed at omegapub.com---the latter is a site with books by Noor's father and brother as well as other Sufi related texts and music.
Cheers,
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