Britain issues a stamp to commemorate Khan. (Courtesy of the Royal Mail)

Noor
Inayat Khan led a very unusual life. She was born in 1914 to an Indian
Sufi mystic of noble lineage and an American half-sister of Perry Baker,
often credited with introducing yoga into America. As a child, she and
her parents escaped the chaos of revolutionary Moscow in a carriage
belonging to Tolstoy’s son. Raised in Paris in a mansion filled with her
father’s students and devotees, Khan became a virtuoso of the harp and
the veena, dressed in Western clothes, graduated from the Sorbonne and published a book of children’s tales — all before she was 25.
One
year later, in May 1940, the Germans occupied Paris. Khan, her mother,
and a younger brother and sister fled like millions of others, catching
the last boat from Bordeaux to England, where she immediately joined the
British war effort. In 1942, she was recruited by Churchill’s elite
Special Operations Executive (SOE) to work in Paris as a wireless
operator. Her clandestine efforts supported the French Underground as
England prepared for the D-Day invasions. Among SOE agents, the wireless
operator had the most dangerous job of all, because the occupation
authorities were skilled at tracking their signals. The average survival
time for a Resistance telegrapher in Paris was about six weeks.
Khan’s
service continued from June 1943 until her capture and arrest by the
Gestapo in October. Her amazing life and eventual murder in Germany’s
Dachau prison camp in September 1944 are the focus of a PBS film
I co-produced that is airing this week. In researching her story, I
came across quite a number of other Muslims who bravely served the
Allied cause — and sometimes made the ultimate sacrifice. History is
rich with examples of their daring heroism and split-second decisions
that helped defeat the Nazis.
Behic Erkin, the Turkish ambassador
in Paris, provided citizenship papers and passports to thousands of
Jews (many with only distant claims to Turkish connections) and arranged
their evacuation by rail across Europe. One fateful day, Necdet Kent,
the Turkish consul-general in Marseille, stymied the shipment of 80
Turkish Jews to Germany by forcing his way onto a train bearing them to
their likely death and arranging for their return, unharmed, to France.
Abdol-Hossein
Sardari used his position at the Iranian consulate in Paris to help
thousands of Jews evade Nazi capture. Later dubbed the Iranian
Schindler, he convinced the occupying Germans that Iranians were Aryans
and that the Jews of Iran had been Iranian since the days of Cyrus the
Great — and, therefore, should not be persecuted. Then he issued
hundreds of Iranian passports to non-Iranian Jews and saved their lives.
Ahmed
Somia, the Tunisian co-director of the French Muslim Hospital outside
Paris, organized weapon caches, facilitated Resistance radio
transmissions, treated wounded Resistance fighters, and helped save many
downed U.S. and British pilots by hiding them in fake T.B. wards where
Gestapo and French gendarmes feared to go.
Khan was posthumously
decorated with the highest British and French civilian and military
honors, but so were other Muslims, including standout heroes among the
2.5 million British Indian troops fighting Axis forces around the globe.
In this largest volunteer army in recorded history, Muslims (roughly
one-third of the force), like Hindus and Buddhists, played prominent
roles. In a letter to President Roosevelt during the war, Churchill
pointed out that Muslim soldiers were providing “the main army elements
on which we [the British] must rely for the immediate fighting.” In
1944-45, the French Army of Africa, joined to de Gaulle’s Free French
Forces, was expanded to 260,000 men, of whom 50 percent were North
African, the great majority being Muslim, while another substantial
group were Senegalese Muslim riflemen. These forces invaded Italy and
helped liberate southern France. According to American historian Juan
Cole, fighting these dark-skinned Africans in “Aryan” Europe, and losing
to them, dismayed many German soldiers steeped in trumped-up theories of racial inferiority.

Eastern
Europe offered more examples. In the Balkans, for instance, only 200
Jews lived in Albania before WWII. Yet by war’s end, almost 2,000 Jews
lived in the country, because so many had fled Greece, Austria and other
locations in Europe to take shelter there among the predominantly
Muslim population, which hid and protected them.
As Cole wrote elsewhere, commemorating
the 70th anniversary of D-Day: “While a few Muslims did support the
Axis, out of resentment of Western colonialism and hopes that the rise
of an alternative power center would aid their quest for independence,
they were tiny in their numbers compared to the Muslims who not just
supported the Allies… but actively fought on their behalf.”
One
of the jobs of documentary film is to rescue stories that fall out of
the history books. Khan’s account, and others like it, seems at odds
with the history of the modern Middle East, whose combatants — whether
Arab, Turkish, Iranian or Israeli — may want for their own reasons to
bury stories about Muslim-Jewish collaboration. But these tales should
be remembered and honored. It is my sincere hope that with the story of
Noor Inayat Khan, we have done just that.
“Enemy of the Reich: The Noor Inayat Khan Story” will air on PBS stations nationwide on Tuesday, September 9^th. Viewers should check their local listings.