Dream Flowers Now in Print!

Dream Flowers Now in Print!

October 22, 2020

Dream Flowers: The Collected Works of Noor Inayat Khan is now in print from Suluk Press. Pir Zia has collected in this volume all of her known creative literary productions from the Inayat Khan family archives in North America and Europe, ranging from short lyric poems to dramatic works and prose. This definitive collection is recommended for all devotees of Noor, as well as students of her life and legacy.

From the Dream Flowers Introduction by Pir Zia Inayat Khan

Noor Inayat Khan, GC, (1914-1944) is remembered as an outstanding hero of the Second World War. She was also a folklorist and writer of considerable gifts. Dream Flowers collects a number of her never-before-published pieces in addition to her major published works: “Twenty Jataka Tales,” “King Akbar’s Daughter,” and “Aède of the Ocean and Land.”

The introduction elucidates the author’s unique literary contribution to the elaboration of Sufism in the West. “To know Noor’s mind and heart, there is no better place to turn than to her literary creations. Noor’s retellings of twenty jātaka tales have remained in print for much of the last century, but other stories from her pen, and her singular mystical drama Aède of the Ocean and Land, have only recently seen publication. Now, at last, it is possible to bring all of Noor’s principal works together under a single cover.

The pages that follow present and contextualize the greater part of Noor’s oeuvre, including several hitherto unpublished pieces. The emerging picture reveals the visionary world of a cosmopolitan author whose constant concern is the life of the soul. Noor’s imagination ranges down the centuries and across the globe, illuminating a tableau of human, animal, and elfin lives together working out a destiny ordained in heaven. Throughout her incantatory wanderings, a seamless continuity links Noor’s ethical and spiritual vision with that of her father, the musician and mystic Hazrat Inayat Khan. To borrow Noor’s words, it was he whose footsteps unveiled her dazzled eyes.”