11 February 2026

Syria, from the Ottomans to al-Qaeda

The country is still haunted by a long and fractured past

Another country: Damascus in the 1830s, when the region was part of the Ottoman empire and before it became widely known as Syria. Photo by History And Art Collection

Ahmed al-Sharaa has been the leader of Syria for little over a year. It’s been a tumultuous time, with continuing unrest and violence in many parts of the country, and yet the gloomier predictions of Al-Sharaa’s rule have not come to pass. He is still at the head of a largely stable, albeit creaking, state. He has formed regional relationships – Syrian representatives have even met with Israeli counterparts. And he is the very first Syrian leader ever to have visited the White House. His jihadi past, fighting for the Islamic State in Iraq and then heading up the former al-Qaeda affiliate group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), led to fears about the implementation of a strict, Islamist law – but these, too, have proved unfounded.

At the same time, Syrians have experienced greater freedom of speech than for more than half a century. The concepts of Syrian citizenship, state and society are all being renegotiated, and a new constitution is being debated. This makes it a timely moment for a much longer historical sweep of the country, which is what Daniel Neep provides in A History of Modern Syria. He shows that many of the issues now facing the country’s leaders are by no means new. “This book seeks to explain how the most recent remaking of Syria has been built on stratified layers of earlier makings and remakings,” he writes, “the first traces of which can be excavated as far back as the 1800s.”

These are indeed mere traces. Two centuries ago, the people in what is now Syria did not consider themselves Arabs – an epithet reserved for those from the Arabian Peninsula, even in the 19th century. “Their common language,” Neep tells us, “conveyed no collective identity.” Nor would they have heard of the word Syria, unless they were scholars of the Roman period. This Greek name, used for the Roman province, was revived by Europeans with designs on the Ottoman empire’s Levantine territories.

The foundations of modern Syria Neep presents are uncoverable only because of the sources he uses. “As much as possible,” he writes, “I tell this story using sources written by Syrians, usually in Arabic, including politicians’ memoirs, officer autobiographies, philosophical essays, newspapers, magazines, literary musings, films and soap operas. My analysis is also informed by the rich Arabic-language scholarship on Syria.” There’s even a rare, snide aside: “(Note to the Western academy: Syrians also write history!)”

This emphasis on Syrian and regional sources leads to some refreshing takes on familiar stories. The fall of the Ottoman empire is routinely attributed to the decadence of its rulers, and their overspending and over-borrowing, but this picture of “the sick man of Europe” is to miss a vital context. “Historians of the 19th century only rarely connect what is usually described as the decline of the Ottoman empire to the vicissitudes of the world economy,” Neep writes, explaining how the crash of 1873, and the subsequent Long Depression, was felt in every sector of society – and how loans to the Ottomans dried up.

But by this period of global financial woe, Ottoman reforms in the economy, politics, education and society had already revitalised the lands that would be Syria. The 19th century brought previously impossible connectivity to the cities of the interior, through road, rails and the telegraph, with all the attendant advantages and anxieties modernity always brings. Both are seen clearly in the flowering of Arabic-language culture, a movement known as the nahda, or renaissance. This rich intellectual life, in turn, affected notions of identity.

“By the 1860s, these new connections had forged the early foundations of a shared regional identity, which would come to be symbolised by the name of ‘Syria’,” Neep writes. This linguistic change, adopting the European term, “marked a shift in how the region’s identity was understood and imagined”.

Rooting the story so far back contradicts the more familiar version of the formation of modern Syria, which refers to colonial action, especially the secretive Sykes-Picot Agreement, to explain the modern Middle East. Neep argues that this ignores not only a long stretch of pre-colonial history but also the agency of Syrians, and many other peoples of the region. The book could be read as one long corrective to the lazy trope of Syria being a product of colonialism, precisely because the sources show the inhabitants’ own desires for their future rather than through the lens of what has been done to the country. And the sources are legion, because the nahda led to a long-lived culture of public debate. An astonishing 355 Arabic-language newspapers were published between 1908 and the First World War throughout the Arab world, allowing for vigorous petitions for Syrian independence after the war, based on well-developed plans for a constitutional monarchy with the Hashemite Faisal at its head.

This is not to say colonialism played no role in the process of state formation. As Neep dryly observes: “The religious, ethnic and socio-economic diversity of Syria presented mandatory officials with an abundance of options for fostering divisions and co-opting local elites.” Their “divide-and-rule” approach was based on “what they saw as sectarian fault lines in Syrian society”, a picture of the country that endures today.

Neep’s attention to the sources shows how misguided such analyses are. For a start, the identities themselves have not been “static and unchanging since ancient times”. Using this framework to understand Syria, past or present, is to miss more fundamental fault lines: the old, landed families wishing to retain their privileged positions vs those arguing for reform; intergenerational divides; regional jockeying for power; political differences and the gap between rich and poor. All these dynamics played a more important role than sect in the shaping of Syria.

It is impossible to read this story without hearing echoes of events in the present. Clashes on the coast between Alawite and government forces, or the struggles of the Druze in the south to maintain their independence of identity, have occurred during Ottoman rule, French rule and each renegotiation of political power post-independence, as well as in the past year. But it is not simply a question of minorities seeking to establish their rights. Neep shows that in all these cases there were intra-sectarian divides on social and political questions. In all regions, old elites sought to maintain local control, while others saw opportunities in a national project.

Despite strong national sentiments during the struggles for independence (achieved in 1946), the following decades were marked by coups: in 1949 alone there were three different military-based takeovers. These were all bloodless, and to some extent the new leaders continued the more revolutionary aims of the nationalistic independence movement; indeed, the first was to remove the president, Shukri al-Quwatli, for his blatant nepotism and corruption. The 1950 constitution is remarkable in its progressivism, ensuring equality before the law and various personal freedoms, and limiting the power of the president. But the pattern was set for non-democratic transfers of power, and future leaders would not be so high-minded in their aims.

It wasn’t only Syrian nationalism that informed the debates at this time. Pan-Arabism was also strong, and the three disastrous years of union with Egypt, when Syria was known as the Northern Province of the United Arab Republic, was not the end of the idea of unification with other Arab countries. Relationships were sought and shut down with Iraq, Jordan and Egypt at different times, according to the political persuasion of whoever was leader. With the rise of the Ba’ath Party, it seemed as if unification with Ba’ath Iraq might be the future – but this was a brief moment. Then, in one of the quieter coups, unsignalled, came a monumental change to the country which would ensure decades of stability – but at a steep price.

Hafez al-Assad, “the sphinx of Damascus”, was already high up in the military and the Ba’athists. Thanks to repeated purges and splits that beset the party through the 1960s, he was “the last man standing”. He became prime minister in 1970, and appointed himself president in 1971, a role he held until his death in 2000. He took control quietly, with little indication of what was to come. He made offers to his rivals, and even established a political coalition, the National Progressive Front, rather than ruling through the Ba’ath Party alone – a move that surprised his fellow Ba’athists, who were unused to power-sharing. But equally quietly, Hafez was implementing a total system of control.

“He intuitively realised that Syria could only be governed through multiple, uneven sources of power: parallel institutions, competing circles, contradictory strategies,” Neep writes. This way, he permeated the entire country, working through micro-communities to establish control and also bind the country together.

Bashar al-Assad inherited this system from his father and kept its institutions of control intact. But he sought to reform the country, opening up the socialist-based, centralist economy to create what he called a “social market economy”. This liberalisation resulted in a wealth disparity not seen since the feudalism of the 19th and early-20th centuries. “Ironically, it was this very imbalance that had motivated the Ba’ath Party’s original commitment to wealth redistribution,” Neep points out.

Once again, it was the corruption and wealth of elites that led to protests in the streets of Syria, and this time none of the architecture of repression Hafez had built could save the Assad regime. It fragmented along new lines, with jihadism emerging as a potent force, also boosted by foreign funding. It was only foreign help, primarily from Russia and Iran, that propped up Bashar for so long – but not, it turned out, forever.

In this long view, Ahmed al-Sharaa’s swift takeover and Bashar’s swift exit to Russia seem entirely in keeping with the country’s history, but that does not make the future predictable. “December 2024 ushered in one of those exceptional, critical moments in which Syria’s political future seemed genuinely undetermined,” Neep writes.

There are many lessons for Al-Sharaa from this 200-year overview of his country’s history, not least how, and why, each new power has struggled to control it. Once again, a leader is trying to rebuild Syrian society “on a terrain not of their own making but one equally shaped by international forces, transnational currents and global crises”. Al-Sharaa is working on both domestic and international fronts, with a population only too ready for rebuilding.

History tells them to fear the worst of politicians shaping the country, all too often for the benefit of the few rather than the many. But it also tells them that great thinkers and politicians with noble aims have emerged from their country. They watch their leader closely, and see both possibilities: he is appointing family and close allies to key positions, yet speaking of co-existence and rights and building sorely needed alliances. Hope and fear intermingle in the new Syria, which is a welcome, if caveated, improvement from the long decades of rule by fear alone.

A History of Modern Syria
Daniel Neep
Allen Lane, 704pp, £40

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[Further reading: The female painters who redefined the British landscape]