More details Ibn Saud converses with U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945. Photo: al-akhbar/file photo.
By Moussa Al-Sadah – Jun 9, 2025
The former Syrian regime’s deformed structure created a unique condition that stalled Syria’s historical trajectory. Historically, Syria embodied the model of the so-called “progressive” Arab state project, built on nationalist and socialist slogans and programs. Its political, cultural, and economic ambitions gave Damascus considerable weight in the Arab world, from industrial production to a vibrant cultural scene, especially in cinema and the arts.
Yet a combination of factors, including political postures, international sanctions, and, above all, the state’s own corruption and sclerosis, pushed Syria into an awkward in-between space. It was neither fully integrated into the Arab liberal economic order, dominated by the flow of oil capital, nor did it offer a genuine alternative model. In the end, “progressivism” became an empty slogan to legitimize the regime, rather than a meaningful project for social or economic transformation.
At the turn of the millennium, the so-called “Damascus Spring” and the accompanying “reforms” (read: liberalization) marked the regime’s attempt to revive the state and its institutions. These reforms sought to reconcile the ruling party’s socialist rhetoric with neoliberal openness. Ironically, this period also saw the flourishing of Syrian-Qatari relations, marked by Qatari investments in real estate and banking, laying the groundwork for the personal feud between the Al Thani and Assad families that would later shape the catastrophic 14-year war, a vendetta paid for by millions of lives.
This uneasy compromise produced a socio-economic monstrosity. The regime neither shielded itself from globalization nor fully embraced it. Politically, it hovered in limbo, too anxious to abandon its traditional party slogans while unsure what to replace them with.
This grotesque hybrid, and the ideological stagnation that accompanied it, slowed Syria’s historical trajectory, leaving it lagging behind broader shifts in the Arab official order and the global system. A key parallel between the two Baathist regimes (Syria and Iraq) was their ideological exhaustion, which paved the way for religion to emerge as an alternative source of legitimacy. From Iraq’s “Faith Campaign” to Syria’s Qubaysiyat movement and the Ministry of Religious Endowments, both states invested in the ideological platform now funded by oil capital: Sunni Salafism. This became especially pronounced after the invasion of Iraq, when the Syrian regime began adopting Saudi Salafist discourse.
This historical pattern offers a lesson for all social movements: when organizational and ideological inertia sets in, other currents inevitably fill the void. Arab states once invested in rural populations through land reform and mobilization, only to later abandon them, outsourcing the resulting social vacuum to religious movements.
In this light, Joulani is not an incidental byproduct but the final crystallization of a Saudi-nurtured “Sunni Salafist identity.” His swift transformation from Salafist militant to Ahmad al-Sharaa—publicly voicing admiration for Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030—does not signal contradiction, but rather marks Syria’s delayed entry into the accelerating Saudi timeline. What took decades elsewhere unfolded in Syria within a matter of months.
This also explains al-Sharaa’s swift pivot toward Saudi Arabia, a move that surprised some and infuriated others. From his first interview with Al-Arabiya to his inaugural visit and prominent media presence, he clearly prioritized the kingdom, sidelining states like Qatar and Turkey, despite their deep investment in Syria. Yet he deftly assigned roles to keep them engaged, even as Saudi primacy became unmistakable. In the words of Harun al-Rashid: “Let the rain fall wherever it pleases. Its blessings shall still reach me.” Wherever Sunni Salafism spreads, its harvest ultimately returns to Saudi Arabia.
Since last December, we’ve been witnessing Joulani’s transformation as he tapped into the last reserves of Saudi investment in Sunni Salafism still active in rural Syria. The four-decade-long Saudi Salafist project reached its symbolic climax with Joulani—the final star of the Awakening era. He used this status as a springboard to mass appeal and, from that summit, converted his popularity into the new Saudi currency: liberalism. In doing so, he transformed from an emissary of The Awakening into an ambassador of The Vision.
The issue extends beyond the absence of political or economic programs among Islamic movements. Their tendency to default to neoliberalism upon gaining power reflects their peripheral relationship to the Saudi center. Until 2017, Saudi political strategy focused on constructing and exporting a politicized Sunni Salafist identity, disseminated globally through Saudi-funded preachers and institutions. This positioned the kingdom as the spiritual compass for these movements.
It’s important to stress that Saudi Arabia does not represent the historical legacy of Sunni Islam or Arab-Islamic thought. But it has undeniably been the producer and patron of a sectarian Sunni identity, just as Iran has done with political Shiism.
To understand what is meant by a politicized Sunni identity, consider the absurd framework of sectarian identity and its terminology: “the Sunnis have no project,” “Sunnis are a nation, not a sect,” “majority vs. minorities,” “resistance is Shiite, moderation is Sunni,” and so on. This worldview echoes Zionist logic in its framing of the Arab region. As Bashar Lakkis notes, Zionism today has shed any pretense of modernity or nationalism, reverting to an identitarian and sectarian tribalism.
Consider how the great figures of Arab resistance, from Abdelkrim al-Khattabi, Emir Abdelkader, Omar al-Mukhtar, Izz al-Din al-Qassam, Ahmad Yassin, and today’s most recognized Arab resistance movement, Hamas, all emerged from Sunni jurisprudence. Yet they are excluded from “Sunni history” because they do not operate under a sectarian framework.
This is because they have no material ties to oil-funded projects, even if those projects shape their surrounding environments. Anti-colonial resistance is not, and cannot be, based on a sectarian identity. Belonging to a sect is different from following a particular school of jurisprudence or a historical narrative. A sectarian identity exists only in relation to others, while resistance movements relate equally to all components of the nation. If they privileged one identity over another, they would fall into the trap of “Sunnification” or “Shiification.”
Moreover, a sectarian identity only fights its counterpart; it does not fight Israel. The condition for resisting colonialism, which seeks to fragment societies and their social fabric, is to mobilize an identity with a national and transnational Arab-Islamic dimension, as seen in the historical model of Arab resistance movements. This cannot be achieved by mobilizing a sect or a tribe, as seen in the failed attempt to mobilize Shiism.
Israeli aggression does not target Sunnism, Shiism, or Druze. These sects harm one another. What the Zionist enemy does fear and target is your Arab identity and, through it, your civilizational belonging to the Arab-Islamic continuum. These values cannot be comprehended by sects, and certainly not by oil-financed regimes. Thus, resistance to colonialism is, by definition, a project of nationhood. And for the nation to be born, the sect must die.
This process of nation-building stands in stark contrast to Saudi Arabia’s efforts to secure its identity and rule, for the project of a Sunni Salafist identity was merely a functional tool for this security. Today, this same pattern repeats itself in the kingdom’s new investment in globalization, entertainment, and consumer culture as loud instruments of soft power. Yet what the kingdom now lacks is the previous effectiveness of its political tools beyond its borders.
Previously, Saudi Arabia relied on Salafist discourse, both violent and nonviolent, and generous financial patronage to secure political loyalty. Now, burdened by domestic priorities and shrinking liquidity, it can no longer sustain social or urban influence networks abroad. This is further compounded by the rise of Saudi nationalism and the Saudi First rhetoric, which portrays foreign spending as an expensive burden with little return. As a result, the kingdom’s ability to project soft power, despite the visible noise, is diminishing.
This is reflected in the trajectory of Joulani, or al-Sharaa, confirming, in the presence of genocide, the political trajectory of Islamist movements propped up by oil wealth. Movements some expected to pave the path for resistance, only to see them climbing up to the US on dead Palestinian bodies. Meanwhile, others derided these movements for their sectarian affiliations, contributing to repulsive sectarian imaginaries, despite knowing that these were merely manifestations of oil wealth, not expressions of an Arab sectarian identity.
Today, al-Sharaa faces the burden of Syria’s slow-moving history in its unique relationship with Saudi Arabia. This isn’t all bad news for him: instead of a trickle-down expansion driven by petro-grants, Syria will become a theater for the horizontal expansion of Gulf investments and their corporations, producing a monstrous new hybrid, entirely severed from the state-building vision that was once hoped for on the eve of independence seventy years ago. In the end, all it will produce is another Jordan.
