This paper argues that the quasi-colonial conditions of the French Mandate for Syria encouraged the founding members of the Arab Academy of Science in Damascus to engage in language reform and the organization of a national canon (turath) as more secure activities than overt political expression. Drawing on the Academy’s journal, texts of Academy lectures, and members’ select published works, this paper revisits the complex relationship of cultural production to political struggles and suggests that, in the case of the Arab Academy, the former was in significant part a transmutation of the latter. “Liberal” intellectuals across the Ottoman Empire, and particularly in the Levant, were galvanized by the “Young Turk” Revolution of 1908 and the vision of a constitutional order based on citizenship and equality of rights and duties, the fulfillment of the state’s generational promotion of the ideology of Ottomanism. However, this constitutional process was “interrupted” by the bitterly received “Turkification” policies of the new regime in Istanbul, the Empire’s epochal defeat in the Great War, and the imposition of the Mandate System over the territories of its Arab heartland in 1920. Consequently, many Arab and Levantine thinkers seized on language as the most widely shared cultural asset which most clearly held out the cosmopolitan, ecumenical promise of late Ottomanism for the newly delimited national populations. At the same time, the reality of Mandate rule and the Mandate’s own ethos of gradualism inclined the Academy, a quasi-state institution, to adopt conservative visions of long-term education and acculturation of the population. The incantation of hurriyya (freedom, liberty) was replaced with the invocation of ‘ilm (science, learning.) The eight founding members of the Academy included committed Islamic reformers as well as three Christians who experimented in new methods of organizing knowledge and weighed in on each other’s work in a collegial, rarefied, and hopeful environment. They claimed to avoid political entanglements but also to serve vitally the Arab/Syrian nation. This paper explores the achievements and tensions of their endeavor in the first formative decade of their body’s career.