Noor-un-Nisa Inayat Khan was born in Moscow on this day in 1914. She was the eldest of the Indian Sufi teacher Pir-O-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan and his American wife Ora Ray Baker’s four children.
Noor spent only a few years in Russia. The family relocated to England ahead of the war, and then finally settling in France. She studied at the Sorbonne and the Paris Conservatory. Noor was a highly accomplished musician, poet, and children’s book author, perhaps best known for her adaptations of the Jataka Tales.
When the Second World war began the family fled again to England. While raised a pacifist Noor found herself drawn into the war. In 1940 she joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force before being recruited into the Special Operations Executive. She was sent to France where we worked as an undercover agent and radio operator. Betrayed to the Germans she was arrested. She briefly escaped, but was recaptured. Refusing to cooperate in any way with her captors, and with her escape, she was classified as “highly dangerous,” and kept in chains before finally being moved to Dachau, where on the 11th of September, 1944, she was executed with a single shot to the back of her head.
Her last word was reported to have been “Liberte!”
Noor Inayat Khan was thirty years old.
She was posthumously awarded the George Cross, the Croix de Guerre with silver star.
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