In December, my husband and I were among the 3,000,000 Muslims who came from around the world to perform the Hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca, in Saudi Arabia, the land where the Prophet Muhammad was born, lived and died. The Hajj is one of the five “pillars” of Islam, the other four being belief in one God, saying five daily prayers, fasting during the month of Ramadan and paying the “poor-due” (charity, as some call it).

Above all, the Hajj is a spiritual journey for atonement and the renewal of faith, and all able-bodied Muslims who can afford to are required to perform it once during their lifetimes. For me, the spiritual aspects of this journey are still too new and too personal to talk about, but I do want to share some thoughts about two aspects of the sexual politics of the Hajj.

First, many of the rituals commemorate not only the prophet Abraham’s test of faith (including his near-sacrifice of his son Ismail), but also the perseverance of Haggar, Abraham’s maidservant and Ismail’s mother. She is buried near the Ka’aba, which is the empty cubic structure that Muslims circle during the Hajj. And we have to go around a low railing called the “skirt of Haggar” during the circumambulation. We also run between the hills of Safa and Marwah to replay Haggar’s desperate search for water there for her infant son.

As the Iranian scholar Ali Shariati says, at the core of many rituals is thus the figure of this black (Ethiopian) woman, a slave, a mother and an immigrant, the most marginal of the marginalized. This fact, however, seems to be lost on most Muslims who either don’t know they are commemorating Haggar or don’t think about how the celebration undercuts views of Islam as a male-oriented religion.

Second, women and men perform identical rites during the Hajj. Side by side, they go around the Ka’aba, pray in the Grand Mosque in Mecca, run between Safa and Marwah, stay in the tent city of Mena, stone the “devil” (temptation), stand in prayer in Arafat, spend the night in Muzdalifah, offer a sacrifice and cut their hair afterward. What better paradigm of sexual equality is there than that?

Sadly, however, the Hajj is performed today not in Arabia, as the land of the Prophet was once called, but in al-Saudia — the land of Saud — as it has now been renamed by the Saud clan. The House of Saud glowers down upon the Ka’aba from the imposing heights of a nearby hill and Saudi-authored booklets override Islam’s command that women must uncover their faces and hands during the Hajj by telling them that they may hide both. In fact, Saudi cultural and sexual mores — crude, tribal, misogynistic — long ago trumped many other teachings of Islam’s scripture and its Prophet.

Ironically, it is the dissolute Saudi monarchy’s custodianship of Islam’s holy sites that gives it cache in the eyes of Muslims and allows it to deform Islam in the name of purifying it. Yet, even the Saudis, with their misogyny and oil money, haven’t been able to stamp out the radical sexual egalitarianism at the heart of the Hajj. It is still there for Muslims to discover if they look for it.

Asma Barlas is director of the Center for the Study of Culture, Race, and Ethnicity and a professor of politics. E-mail her at abarlas@ithaca.