Noor Inayat Khan, one of the heroines of World War II, had a short, astonishing life, one that took her from a pacifist childhood to a daring career in covert operations. She was an Indian-American Muslim woman who worked as a British spy — a radio operator — in Nazi-occupied Paris.
A new docudrama about her, Enemy of the Reich: The Noor Inayat Khan Story, premieres Tuesday on PBS.
Alex Kronemer, executive producer of the film, calls Inayat Khan “a very unlikely British agent” — in part because of her spiritual background. Born in Moscow in 1914, Inayat-Khan was the daughter of an American mother and an Indian father. Her father, a Sufi Muslim who preached tolerance and believed all religions were one, raised his daughter as a pacifist.
“A woman who grew up raised not to lie, raised to be a pacifist — and yet here she was doing one of the most dangerous missions in the war and doing it when many people backed away,” Kronemer tells NPR’s Arun Rath.
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