Syria has revised its state school textbooks to remove references to Ottoman occupation, replacing the description with terms such as Ottoman governance as relations with Turkey strengthen following the fall of the Assad regime.
The revised curriculum also recasts the Great Arab Revolt of 1916 to 1918 as an insurgency, strips the butcher title long attached to Ottoman governor Ahmet Djemal Pasha, and softens descriptions of Turkish rule during the First World War.
The changes follow ministerial directives issued by the Syrian Ministry of Education in January 2025. According to IMPACT-se, an international research organisation that monitors school curricula, many of the revisions were introduced for the 2025 to 2026 academic year, though officials retained much of the earlier material and applied the revisions selectively rather than uniformly across all textbooks.
Revisions to the Arab Revolt
The most prominent adjustments appear in the revised history textbook for final year secondary school students. The book no longer uses the term Great Arab Revolt to refer to the campaign launched by Sharif Hussein bin Ali against Ottoman forces during the First World War, designating the conflict instead as the rebellion movement of Hussein bin Ali.
Previous Syrian textbooks taught the uprising as a fight for Arab independence with the explicit goal of liberating Arab lands from Ottoman occupation and the authority of the Unionist Turks. In the new version, the objective is described as detaching Arab territories from the Ottoman State, while the text places much heavier weight on Hussein's cooperation with Allied powers.
A similar modification appears in lessons on the Anglo-French Declaration of 7 November 1918. Earlier editions framed the declaration around freeing local populations from Turkish injustices. The updated text removes references to Turkish oppression, defining the Allied goal instead as removing Ottoman forces to facilitate the establishment of national governments.
Portrayal of Djemal Pasha
The curriculum also introduces substantial changes to the history of Ahmet Djemal Pasha, the Ottoman military official who governed Syria and the wider eastern Mediterranean during the First World War.
Generations of Syrian students previously learned of him as Djemal Pasha the butcher, a moniker linked to the public executions of prominent Arab figures in Damascus and Beirut on 6 May 1916. Earlier textbooks depicted those executed leaders as national martyrs who sacrificed their lives defending Arab identity and Arab rights.
The new textbook drops the butcher label entirely and refers to conspirators among the executed men who collaborated with Britain and France. While the executions remain part of the historical syllabus, the revised text emphasises foreign coordination and argues that foreign interference accelerated the rebellion led by Hussein.
Terminology of the Ottoman Era
Across the curriculum, directives from the education ministry instruct schools to abandon the phrase Ottoman occupation in favour of terms like Ottoman governance or Ottoman administration. The wording reflects a deliberate departure from the secular Arab nationalist ideology promoted for decades under the Ba'ath party and the ousted government of Bashar al-Assad.
Under Ba'athist rule, state textbooks routinely portrayed the four centuries of Ottoman dominance across the Levant as a dark period of foreign subjugation. The new editorial stance moves away from that nationalist lens, allocating greater space to the political and Islamic character of the Ottoman Empire.
While the Arab uprising and the 1916 executions remain in Syrian classrooms, the underlying narrative has been fundamentally reinterpreted. The shift aligns Damascus more closely with Ankara, as the Syrian leadership under Al Sharaa moves to strengthen diplomatic and political ties with Turkey.
