Noor: The Story of a Name

In upstate New York, in the year 1980, a baby was born in an octagonal log cabin in a Sufi commune. Before that birth - before conception, even, she was stepped in the Sufi practices of The Abode of The Message. She was named Jemila Noor Inayat Mermey - Jemila after the midwife who helped birth her, who later changed her name to Taj, Noor after Noor Un Nisa, who gave her life as the first woman wireless radio operator for the SOE during World War 2, who stayed behind after she could’ve gone home, to pave the way for the Normandy invasion; Inayat after Hazrat Inayat Khan, who was a key figure in founding the Sufi movement in The United States, Europe and Scandinavia, and Mermey, a modified form of Mermelstein, intended to help first generation Jewish immigrants avoid persecution in the United States. Meals were held in a communal dining hall, and Sufi dances took place in the basement.

In the communal dining hall, Jemila played under the table with her first friend, Katrina, whom she idolized, much as that is a no-no in Islam; thankfully the Sufism founded by Hazrat Inayat Khan did not require one to become a Muslim in order to be a Sufi, though he himself considered himself Islamic and was overt in his commitment to maintaining that Sufism was grounded in Islam. Jemila didn’t care about all that. What she cared about was that Katrina, three months older - yes, Katrina was really someone to look up to, and when Katrina first learned how to walk, Jemila was extremely motivated to get the hang out that skill too! Katrina had a doll named Kwan Yin. Jemila named her doll Kwon Yin too. Jemila watched the Sufi dancers whirl from a perch on the steps that led to a lower level. When she was two and a half, Jemila’s parents left that community, yet always felt they were Sufis in their hearts. Without a community, they lacked support, but they did their best to maintain the practices. As a little girl it was weird being named Jemila in a white culture, with mostly blond kids who looked notably different. Someone once asked her, on appearance alone, “Are you Jewish,” in a scornful tone that indicated, this was not a good thing to be. Jemila answered truthfully: “I’m half-Jewish.” There was also the other hard part about having that name: Hardly anyone could say it. Once, in a shop, a Turkish man said it correctly and it actually sounded beautiful. But normally, people were so creative messing it up, the little girl couldn’t imagine how it they could find all the wrong ways to say it. She longed to be more normal than her already weird family. Noor, she thought sounded too much like manure. Inayat, what was that? And Mermey…it just added to the weirdness. She wished her name were Alicia.

Yet as time went on, things conspired to help Jemila embrace her name: She went to a summer camp at Wellesley College, designed to help prepare for college. There were a bunch of kids from Arabic speaking countries there, and Jemila instantly had a connection with a girl from Bahrain and a boy from Kuwait. They loved her name and embraced her, and gave it a sense of normalcy and appreciation. It meant, “beautiful with God’s beauty.”

In High School, at least for the first year, Jemila’s friends were mostly foreign exchange students. Among foreigners, she felt at home. At Acton-Boxboro High School, the kids in Jemila’s class who were American were all, for the most part destined for great things in the most conventional sense, and all the people in her honor’s English class one, - well all but one Jewish girl named Kira - had a cynical attitude and made Jemila feel uncomfortable just to be around them.

In Portland, as a woman in her twenties, Jemila met a young woman in Portland named Jamuna who was also born in a commune. She loved the name and called that twenty-something woman “Jemila Tequila.” Of course, I’ve never been much for alcohol, as it does between nothing and almost nothing for me. I dance on tables and anywhere else sober, and for the most part, alcohol does nothing but make me tired and if it’s hard liquor, a little silly, but not that much sillier than I am already.

How did I go from being Jemila to Alicia?

In a session with Suzy Miller, a multidimensional communicator who specialized at the time in working with the higher consciousness of children and parents of children on the spectrum, something wonderful and unexpected happened:

She had just started describing seeing a woman in a blue dress stepping forward as an aspect of my higher self. I suddenly felt urgently compelled to interrupt and ask, “Does she have a name?”

Suzy laughed a tiny bit and said, “She knew you were going to ask and yes she does. She’s saying her name is Alicia.”

Of course I hadn’t told Suzy Miller than I had wished so much during much of my middle to late childhood that my my name were Alicia, but following that session and one more, with what was downloaded, I decided to change my name legally to the one I have now. I changed it shortly before we moved to Madison, WI.

I didn’t think too much about my Sufi heritage until last summer. In August, I began singing “Salaam, Shalom” all around my neighborhood on my walks, and my son and I composed a song by that name. One day we we ended up singing Salaam Alekum, Shalom Alehem for an Iranian family on their moving day, even thought we’d only just met them. It brought the Iranian mother and daughter to tears, and the mom ran in the house and came out with an incredible painting her husband had created, with a Hafiz painted like platinum and stardust across the canvas, which she gave me as a gift of thanks. It now hangs on my wall. I sung that song for a Jewish woman who now has a “We stand with Israel” sign in her window. But when I sang that song, she loved it. She’d heard me singing from down the street and told me, “I asked myself, where is that angelic music coming from?” I explained to her that Salaam means the same thing as Shalom. “Shalom I know, but this Salaam…this is new for me.” I stood, having that conversation with her, while I was in front of the Iranian family’s house and she was just across the street. We formed a bridge. Although I believe she believes the propaganda, I also know she has a good heart.

When I was a teenager, my favorite color was a deep blue between royal blue and indigo. I didn’t find out until last year, that Noor, my middle namesake, apparently loved to wear blue dresses, and in fact, appeared in a vision to her brother after her death, but before he knew of it, in a halo of blue light. Her last name was Khan. Mine is now Kwon.

I asked an intuitive friend of mine, “What is my connection with Noor?” They said, “You are sisters in an angelic order of a higher realm.”

It is a funny thing to talk about what we may be in higher realms, while we are so very human while we are here. Because having a connection to something like that doesn’t take away the full humanness.

When I was a child I thought of the name “Noor” and I thought “manure.” But it turns out Noor means light.

To be human really is to embrace the light and the shit, and to use it for fertilizer.

In my first book, Life of An Intern’s Wife, I wrote on the back cover, “The deeper the shit, the prettier the flowers when they bloom.”

Noor also wrote about flowers, but far more poetically.

Who has heard my painful cry

Who has heard my sigh?

Lo! In my enchantment deep

Nature is alseep

Ah! Rose bud is bedewed

With my tears bestrewed

Natures moved to ecstasy

In my mystery…

The excerpt above, by Noor, is from The Song of The Night, as found in We Rubies Four by Claire Ray Harper and David Ray Harper. Claire was the younger sister of Noor.

https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/who-was-noor-khan/

Photo from Noorsociety

https://www.thearchaeologist.org/blog/a-40000-year-old-bracelet-discovered-in-siberia-may-have-been-crafted-by-an-extinct-human-species