Noor’s notion of firearms was consistent with her upbringing. Raised in a spiritual cocoon near Paris, her father, Hazrat Inayat Khan, an internationally renowned mystic, had raised her to be “chivalrous,” an archaic term to the rest of us though to Sufis one pregnant with meaning and purpose. Early on in this miserable war, Noor had concluded that if she didn’t fight—and fight in her way—then she would betray her heritage and betray her father. He had taught her to love others, to serve them, to never shirk from the dangers and difficulty of improving the world. Not fighting the Nazis would have been heresy, and Noor was not a heretic. Her plane had taken off from England on a Wednesday, a day, according to her father, “for taking an initiative. . . . All that is done on this day must bear fruit.” She landed on a Thursday, “a day of inspiration, of revelation.” If Noor had to use the Webley M1907 she was holding, it could have been a revelation. Of sorts.
After three minutes on the ground—the longer Rymills stayed there, the greater the chance the Germans would find him—he was back in the air, his engine at full blast. He’d had a good flight. He always did. Yet for the entire trip back to England, he couldn’t get Noor out of his mind. Flying north, Rymills kept his eyes on the sky and on his instruments, occasionally scanning the horizon for England’s coast, while Noor remained behind him in France. Rymills was confident that “Madeleine” (Noor’s code name) could handle whatever came her way. He’d sensed that she was capable of absenting herself from the immediacy of the moment, then returning to it refreshed and invigorated. She seemed to have done that even while flying in a noisy, rickety Lysander. If she could do it in a Lysander, Rymills figured, she could do it while nosing around France for the SOE.
By the time Rymills reached the Channel, Noor was on her way to a safe house near Paris, perhaps remembering that her father had wondered in one of his lectures “if it is bad for children to play with tin soldiers.” His answer was surprising: even toys can prepare us for the harshness of life, for vicissitudes that some mystics pretend don’t exist or that they say can be transcended by burrowing into our own personal nirvana. But Noor’s father was a practical mystic. He didn’t seek students who yearned for an elusive transcendentalism that could buffer them from the rigors of the world. Rather, he taught the value of meeting the quotidian challenges of life with the wholeness of one’s spirit and the truth of one’s soul. “We should first try to become human,” Inayat wrote. “To become an angel is not very difficult; to be material is very easy; but to live in the world, in all the difficulties and struggles of the world, and to be human at the same time, is very difficult. If we become that, then we become the miniature of God on earth.” For Inayat, spirituality didn’t reside in another realm. It was here. It was now. And it was real.
Surveying the ups and downs of life, Inayat rarely provided simple answers, especially when it came to being a citizen of a nation. He knew that the price of defending a country’s safety, dignity, and honor could be war and it could be death: unsettling confessions for a man of peace and a man of God. As much as Inayat Khan disliked war, he also disliked citizens dodging their responsibility for their country’s stability and preservation, and for its very existence. Now, more than a decade after Inayat’s death, tin soldiers had turned into live ones, and his beloved daughter Noor, who had been raised in peace and for peace, was among them. Frank Rymills and his compact Lysander had seen to that.
For Lysander pilots, “The moon was as much of a goddess as she ever was in a near eastern religion.”
PART ONE
THE RISING
The soul has no birth, no death, no beginning, no end.
—HAZRAT INAYAT KHAN
CHAPTER 1
THE AIR OF HEAVEN
The Khans were royalty, a lineage they traced to Tipu Sultan, Inayat Khan’s great-great-grandfather. In the eighteenth century, Tipu had stubbornly resisted Britain turning India into a colony of its vast empire, fighting against England more than any sovereign in the Asian subcontinent. Having Tipu in the Khans’ family tree was like a Vietnamese having Ho Chi Minh as an ancestor or an American having Patrick Henry. In fact, Tipu and the Americans were fighting the British at the same time—the Americans for their independence, Tipu for his freedom. Though their wars were halfway around the globe from one another, they recognized allies where they could find them: Tipu sent money to the Americans along with a letter to the Continental Congress proclaiming, “For every blow that is struck in the cause of American liberty throughout the world, . . . and so long as a single insolent savage tyrant remains, the struggle shall continue.” Touched, Benjamin Franklin sent Tipu a copy of the Declaration of Independence. The Americans won their war. Tipu lost his. In four long military campaigns, he earned the respect of the British, but never their defeat.
Inayat Khan was born in 1882 into a family of Muslims, Brahmins, brilliant musicians, revered holy men, and brave warriors. (“Inayat” means “kind,” “generous.” “Khan” translates as “lofty,” “chief,” or “ruler.”) At an early age, he was fascinated by the dervishes who traveled through his town, and he was riveted by the stories his father told him that always had an elevating and instructive moral. But at the age of fourteen he was annoyed that he still had no proof that God heard his prayers. His grandfather’s advice—“The signs of God are seen in the world, and the world is seen in thyself”—inspired him to seek God everywhere, and in everyone, and in himself. A pilgrim in search of a way, a truth, a path, he studied with Hindu gurus, Zoroastrian saints, Buddhist monks, and Sufi masters, learning yoga, meditation, and breath control, the poetry of Rumi, the wisdom of the Koran and the Bhagavad Gita, and how to sink into reveries from holy music for hours on end. He learned about community, about solitude, and about power. Watching a herd of elephants in Nepal bring a tiger to bay by surrounding it in the woods, Inayat concluded that “unity can stand against any power, however great”; and meditating with holy men convinced him of the power of a quiet, still mind. Soon, myths grew about Inayat: he was superhuman, superwise, holy, sacred, luminous. In truth, he was a seeker like any other man.
Inayat married a cousin when he was twenty. She died a few days after the wedding. Grieving, he set off on a pilgrimage, performing for maharajahs and prime ministers in distant provinces. He married again, then mourned again when his second wife died a year later. Again he searched for solace, eventually performing in Hyderabad for a prince who, soothed by Inayat’s music, invited him to join his court. For four years, Inayat studied there with a Sufi master. In 1908, his dying teacher told him to go “into the world, harmonize the East and the West with the harmony of thy music,” and “thereby spread the wisdom of Sufism, for thou art gifted by Allah, the most merciful and compassionate.”
Two years later, Inayat, two of his brothers, and a cousin—all musicians—left for New York. Inayat found Western music more disciplined, systematic, and dignified than music in India. There, musicians—offering empty “amusement” for the idle rich—knew little about the theory of music, and were often afraid their students might outshine them. Though Inayat left India “to admire the works of God by appreciating music in the different parts of the civilized world,” he always planned to return: “I wish to . . . pick up foreign music and give [it] to my friends.”