The Guardian Newspaper has ended the fortnightly column of its sole regular Muslim columnist. Noorjehan Barmania (pictured) started writing for the paper in August 2007 for a special series called ‘This Muslim Life‘, for its G2 supplement.

It was positioned as a light hearted take on a woman “searching for her place in British society”.

Ms Barmania had come over to the UK from South Africa.

Today the newspaper publishes her final column, charting her journey through the UK and offering a glimpse into her tribulations as a Muslim columnist. She writes:

In that sense, the columns were also a letter to South Africa, to the family I had left behind. They charted my journey through foreign waters, both political and religious, and allowed me to say the things I never could have in person. Not long after I wrote the column about my not fasting during the month of Ramadan, I had a call from my mother, decreeing that Muslims don’t broadcast what we do wrong, let alone in the press. There is little room for discussion, debate or dissent in Islam. Set this against the context of a deeply patriarchal religious framework, and it means that Muslim women pay a price of not being heard within their families and society.

Her different background also led to some difficulty, she says:

Being a South African immigrant of Asian heritage seemed to complicate things. I was neither this nor that. I was too African for the British Asian scene, too Asian for the British Africans and too aggressively, ideologically black for the polite chattering classes of middle England.

But she eventually found love in the UK and became more assured of her changing identity. That impacted her writing.

Once I saw that I would find a home in British society, the columns seemed to lose some of their angst and became more content, culminating in the acquisition of my British citizenship. The focus was more the stuff of everyday life: holidays, weddings, babies. …In a sense, those more recent columns were what I most wanted to be heard about British Muslims – that we are just like everyone else.

It is not yet known whether the liberal newspaper will replace her with another Muslim columnist.