One might intuitively assume that the Syrian Sunni ulama (religious scholars) would valorize periods emblematic of Islam’s bygone grandeur, such as the Umayyad or Ottoman empires. In practice, however, their historical narratives accord greater significance to the era of parliamentary rule spanning the late French Mandate through the early years of independence (1932–1963). This emphasis stems in part from the fact that this period is portrayed by Syrian ulama as a nahda (“renaissance”) of Islamic knowledge. Yet this focus on the parliamentary era is also driven by political considerations. First, against a backdrop of sectarian violence, the ulama have underscored the harmony that purportedly characterized interreligious relations during that period, attributing this in particular to the efforts of religious leaders to foster such concord. Second, during the parliamentary era, the ulama enjoyed an unprecedented degree of autonomy, a circumstance that once again stands in sharp contrast to the present situation.
December 8, 2024: Islamic conquest or liberation?
The new Syrian authorities and their supporters have drawn a parallel between the rebels’ capture of Damascus on 8th of December 2024, on the one hand, and the 7th-century Islamic conquest (fath) of Syria, on the other hand. As early as January 2012, current President Ahmad al-Sharaa signed the first statement of his organisation (then named Jabhat al-Nusra, “the Support Front”) as “the Conqueror (al-fatih) Abu Muhammad al-Julani”. This grandiose title (e.g., the Ottoman Sultan who is commonly referred as “the Conqueror” is Mehmed II, who captured Constantinople from the Byzantine Empire) was far from an obvious fit for a complete unknown whose only achievement, back then, was the establishment of a small underground organisation.
The notion of “Islamic conquest” remained central to al-Sharaa’s organisation until 2015-2016, which saw the successive establishment of the Army of Conquest (jaysh al-fath), a Nusra-dominated rebel alliance, and of the Levant Conquest Front (jabha fath al-sham), a revamped version of Jabhat al-Nusra following the latter’s decision to sever its ties to al-Qaeda. In 2017, however, the organisation renamed itself the Levant Liberation Committee (hay’a tahrir al-sham, hereafter HTS), a means to distance itself from pan-Islamic Jihadi ideology while moving closer (rhetorically at least) to the Syrian revolutionary mainstream.
The 2024 collapse of the Asad regime, which many Syrians perceived as an unexpected miracle, gave new impetus to the use of the term fath by members and supporters of the new regime. In a speech he gave on 29 January 2025 in front of the military commanders who were about to appoint him as president, al-Sharaa himself used the Quranic expression al-fath al-mubin (“the Clear Victory”) to describe the toppling of the former regime.
A few Sunni religious scholars, although supportive of the new regime, expressed polite disagreement as to this use of the term fath. Among them was Dr Imad al-Din al-Rashid, who was appointed as the Dean of the Faculty of Sharia at the University of Damascus in March 2025. In a Friday sermon he gave shortly after the fall of Assad and his own consequent return to Syria, al-Rashid warned that speaking of fath implied that just like early 7th-century Damascus, pre-December 8 Damascus was not a Muslim city. Speaking in a well-off neighbourhood of the capital that had experienced relatively little violence and displacement during the war, he insisted that, on the contrary, those who had remained in the city during the past fourteen years were in fact “steadfast guardians of Islam” (murabitin), provided, of course, they had not actively collaborated with the former regime. It was, therefore, more correct to speak of “liberation” (tahrir) rather than fath.
This viewpoint has officially prevailed: as per a presidential decree issued in October 2025, nationwide celebrations were held on December 8 of that year on the occasion of “Liberation Day” (‘id al-tahrir). The term fath has not disappeared, however,i as it endows the new rulers with greater religious legitimacy than the more “secular” tahrir.
The Umayyads: multi-faceted symbolism
“We are Muslims, not Umayyads”, Mufti of A‛zaz Mahmud al-Jabir (a well-known critique of the new regime) stated in May 2025 in response to increasingly frequent references to the Umayyad dynasty among constituencies loyal to al-Sharaa. In February, for instance, prominent pro-government media figure Musa al-Omar had posted a video of the president riding a horse to a song praising the Umayyads’ “golden lineage” and their name that “sent fears in Persian kings.”ii
For mainstream Sunni religious scholars, the Umayyads are problematic in two respects. First, they were key protagonists in the conflicts occasioned by the succession of Prophet Muhammad, a topic most ulama tend to avoid as they profess love for the Al al-Bayt (family of the Prophet) while acknowledging the legitimacy of the Umayyads on a pragmatic basis, namely, their victory over the descendants of Ali. Second, Umayyad Caliphs are not remembered as particularly pious rulers except for ‘Umar bin ‘Abd al-‘Aziz (r. 717-720), who is, for this very reason, the only member of the dynasty to regularly feature as a role model in mainstream Sunni religious discourse in Syria.
A more distinctly anti-Shia tradition epitomized by Ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328) and currently championed by Salafi scholars (who have remained a minority among Syria’s ulama) has set the Umayyads up as a symbol of exclusionary Sunni identity. A notable example was that of Zahran ‘Allush (1971-2015), a Salafi preacher and founder of the Islam Army (jaysh al-islam). Following the Lebanese Hezbollah’s 2013 military intervention in support of the Asad regime, ‘Allush recorded a speech in the ruins of the Umayyad palace of Qasr al-Hayr al-Sharqi (near Palmyra). Likewise, addressing Shia supporters of the Asad regime, he famously promised that “the Umayyads’ glory will return to Damascus, whether you like it or not!” Twelve years later, TV preacher ‘Adnan al-‘Ar‛ur, who had first made a name of himself in the late 2000s with his anti-Shia programmes, came back to the homeland after a fifty-year long exile in Saudi Arabia. From Damascus’ Umayyad square, he proudly stated: “We have returned to the capital of the Umayyads, the capital of Mu‘awiya” (this is the founder of the dynasty and, as such, a particularly hated figure among the Shia). Likewise, at the Umayyad Mosque, al-‘Ar‛ur reminded his listeners that they were “the descendants of the Umayyads.”
Umayyadism conveys more than anti-Shia and anti-Iranian sentiments, however. Because the Umayyads turned the Arabs into major players on the world stage, and because they had their capital in Damascus, they also constitute a potent symbol of Syrian Arab identity, which is why their memory was also cultivated by the former regime: Hafez el-Assad had his name engraved on the façade of the Umayyad mosques in Damascus. Like its counterpart in Aleppo, the latter was the only historical monuments in Syria whose restoration was directly funded by the Presidency.iii Other characteristics of Umayyad rule can be emphasised to the attention of specific constituencies, such as their pragmatism (as mentioned above, they were often not very devout Muslims) and relatively tolerant treatment of Christians, who remained a majority of the population in the territories of today’s Syria under Umayyad rule.iv
A last, and so far, more subliminal implication of the reference to the Umayyads, is the fact that they were a monarchy. When al-Sharaa visited Jordan in February 2025, for instance, HTS-aligned social media accounts praised the encounter between the Umayyads and the Hashemites.v In the summer of 2025, rumours that al-Sharaa was considering turning himself into a king were debated on the pro-government Syria TV. Whatever the truth to this rumours, this latter aspect of Umayyadism has gained little traction among the country’s Sunni religious scholars: first, because embracing that rhetoric would immediately identify them as unreserved sycophants of the new regime; second, because many of them quietly harbour reservations about al-Sharaa’s ambitions of unchecked personal rule.
The Ottomans: codename for ‘Turkey’
In the 1960s and 1970s, extolling the virtues of the Ottoman Empire was a means for some ulama to voice their critique of Arab nationalism, that is, the main ideological pillar of the Baathist regime. Dr Sa’id Ramadan al-Buti, who in the following decades became one of the Assad family’s most ardent religious supporters, then famously branded nationalism as a virus that European imperialism and Freemasonry had introduced into the Ottoman Empire to destroy it from within.vi Conversely, “Ottomanostalgia’ was encouraged during Bashar’s first decade in power to legitimise Syria’s fast-paced rapprochement with Turkey. In 2009, for instance, head of the al-Fath Islamic Institute Sheikh Husam al-Din Farfur emphasized the two countries’ “half a millennium of common history”. Al-Buti concurred, hailing the newfound friendship between Damascus and Ankara as “the premise of the coming Islamic unity.”vii
Another countervailing shift occurred after 2011 as a result of Turkey’s support for the Syrian opposition and, as of 2016, its direct military intervention in the war. Pro-Assad ulama then revived the Arab nationalist narrative of “Ottoman occupation’. The latter, for instance, was blamed by Minister of Religious Endowments Muhammad ‘Abd al-Sattar al-Sayyid for the establishment of the Grand Muftiship, a “historical error” that the president “corrected” by abolishing that position in 2021.viii
By contrast, and counter-intuitively, references to the Ottoman past became exceedingly rare in the outward discourse of those Sunni ulama who turned against Assad and sought refuge abroad. Most settled in Istanbul, where they established the Syrian Islamic Council in 2014. Although overtly grateful for Turkey’s support, and generally favourable to its policies in Syria, they also tried to preserve some level of autonomy, a trend notably illustrated by the Council’s criticism of Ankara’s tentative rapprochement with the Asad regime in 2022-2023. Back then, just like today, references to the Ottoman past seem to have been avoided because they act as reminders of an unpleasant reality, namely, the fact that Turkey is both an indispensable and overbearing ally.
A (liberal) golden age
The historical period that the Syrian Sunni ulama most enthusiastically evoke in their public discourse is the liberal era stretching from the end of the French Mandate to the early years of independence. Their nostalgia of this period is primarily rooted in reasons that are strictly internal to the country’s Sunni religious scene. It is remembered as an era marked by a “renaissance” (nahda) of religious knowledge, a traditionalist revival that is entirely distinct from the (predominantly modernist) Arab Nahda that has received far greater attention in Western historiography. The Mandate-era renaissance of religious knowledge is credited to Sheikh Badr al-Din al-Hasani (1850-1935) in Damascus and to the Islamic seminary established in 1922 at Aleppo’s Khusrawiyya madrasa. Such narratives of refoundation are key to the legitimacy of the newcomers who came to dominate Syria’s religious scene in the second half of the 20th century, owing to the disappearance of the ancient ulama families, whose sons were now embracing more socially desirable careers as physicians, lawyers, or politicians. Evocations of this episode has remained a staple of Syrian Sunni religious discourse until today, as illustrated by an interview with Sheikh Abu al-Khayr Shukri shortly before his appointment as Minister of Religious Endowments in March 2025.
Syrian ulama also exalt the mid-20th century as the period during which the Syrian people succeeded in foiling France’s attempts at dividing the country along sectarian lines. Speaking at the presidential palace a few weeks after the March 2025 massacres of Alawites in the coastal region, Grand Mufti Usama al-Rifa‛i reminded the audience that his own mother was born, as per her birth certificate, in the short-lived State of Damascus, which the French had established alongside similar statelets like the State of Aleppo, the State of the Alawites, and the State of the Druzes. Yet al-Rifa‛i insisted, Syrians resisted such policies as they “remained a single hand and a single heart”. Religious leaders, the Grand Mufti claims, had played a critical role in the cultivation of inter-religious harmony at the time. In a previous speech, he had told the story of the friendship between prominent Sunni Muslim scholar Bahjat al-Bitar (1894-1976) and Christian Prime Minister Faris al-Khuri (1944-1945 and 1954-1955)—as the latter had once forgotten his hat, he recounted, the former lent him his turban.
Finally, the ulama fondly recall the level of freedom they enjoyed during the liberal era. Generally cordial relations with the political elites of the time translated into official religious institutions that enabled the ulama to manage their own affairs with limited executive oversight. Although they only exerted limited influence over decision-makers, they were at least free to take advantage of the liberal political system to make their voice heard by issuing statements, petitions, and voting instructions. For instance, upon his appointment as Grand Mufti by the Syrian Islamic Council in 2021, al-Rifa‛i recounted how his predecessor Abu al-Yusr ‘Abidin (in office 1952-1963) organised a press campaign against the Minister of Tourism, who had ignored his demand to have a poster showing a half-naked female dancer removed from the facade of a cabaret.
Lastly, between 1946 and the 1963 military coup, the ulama ran their own political organisation, the League of Ulama, which issued voting instructions and even fielded its own candidates, though with limited success. The Syrian Islamic Council that was established in 2014 was, in essence, a reincarnation of the League in a broader form. Yet al-Sharaa ordered its dissolution in June 2025 against the will of al-Rifa‛i and many of his colleagues. Against this backdrop of re-emerging authoritarian governance, Syrian ulama will probably continue to idealize the bygone days of parliamentary rule.
Conclusion
Recent history occupies a more prominent place in the historical imagination of the Syrian Sunni ulama than the distant past. Invocations of the Islamic conquests or the Umayyad Caliphate may be deployed to affirm—or to dispute—the religious legitimacy of the al-Sharaa regime, just as recollections of the Ottoman period evoke Turkey’s tutelage over the new Syrian state. Yet it is the parliamentary era of 1932–1963 that endures as the ulama’s true golden age. Remembered as a time of religious revival, intercommunal coexistence, and institutional autonomy from state control, this liberal interlude functions as both retrospective ideal and political critique. In elevating that moment, the ulama articulate not only a rebuke of authoritarian rule but also an enduring aspiration to transcend political subordination.
Dr Thomas Pierret is Senior Researcher at the Institute for Research and Studies on the Arab and Muslim World (IREMAM), National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), Aix-Marseille Université in Aix-en-Provence, France. He holds a PhD in Political Science from Sciences Po-Paris and the University of Louvain. He was previously Senior Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, and Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University. His publications include Religion and State in Syria: The Sunni Ulama from Coup to Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Utopianism in the Middle East and North Africa (Edinburgh University Press, 2025), and the chapter on Syria in the 10th edition of Government and Politics of the Middle East and North Africa (Routledge, forthcoming).
i See for instance this statement by the Ministry of Religious Endowment: Taht al-Majhar, 7 December 2025, https://web.archive.org/web/20260119224406/https://www.almjhar.com/ar-sy/NewsView/2212/296160/اجتماع_موس_ع_في_جامع_سعد_بن_معاذ_يجمع_كبار_علماء_دمشق_ومسؤولي_الدولة_تأكيد_على_دور_المساجد_في_ترسيخ_الأمن_والوعي.aspx.
ii The New Umayyads. Syria in Transition 23, https://web.archive.org/web/20260119230946/https://www.syriaintransition.com/en/home/archive/issue-23/the-new-umayyads.
iii Stéphane Valter. La Construction nationale syrienne. Légitimation de la nature communautaire du pouvoir par le discours historique (CNRS éditions, 2002).
iv Aaron Zelin. Christians in the New Syria: Accepted, but at-risk. The Caravan, December 9, 2025, https://web.archive.org/web/20251210052600/https://www.hoover.org/research/christians-new-syria-accepted-risk.
v The New Umayyads.
vi Thomas Pierret. Religion and State in Syria. The Sunni Ulama from Coup to Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2013): 78.
vii Thomas Pierret. Sunni Islamists: From Syria to the Umma, and Back. In M. Cimino (ed.). Syria: Borders, Boundaries, and the State (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020): 229.
viii Thomas Pierret. Minister vs. Mufti the struggle over ‘moderate Islam’ in wartime Syria (2011–2021), Mediterranean Politics. DOI: 10.1080/13629395.2024.2385780 : 18.
Cite as: Pierret, T. 2025. “The Sunni Ulama: Syria’s Parliamentary Era as a Golden Age” Focaalblog March 24. https://www.focaalblog.com/2026/03/24/thomas-pierret-the-sunni-ulama-syrias-parliamentary-era-as-a-golden-age/
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