This paper explores the development of the Sayyeda Zaynab shrine in Damascus, Syria, from the 1930s-1970s, tracing its transformation from a modest gravesite to a site of transnational importance. The shrine would become a microcosm of the conflicts over authority, ideology, and identity in the developing nation-state, providing a window into the distinct ways that sectarianism was produced. In the 1930s, driven by the new transnational narratives of Zaynab’s importance and the work of the marja’ Syed Muhsin al-Amīn, religious clerics, political elites, and the Syrian Murtadha family undertook efforts to create a shrine that would rival the pilgrimage sites of Iran and Iraq. For al-Amīn’s ideological reformism, Zaynab represented the ideal mourner in character and behavior, and the presence of her grave in Damascus could be a place to raise the status of Shi’as under the French Mandate, a site where his modernist vision of Karbala rituals could be enacted. Historiography on the Syrian nationalist movement has privileged the role of a Sunni urban elite, yet in the Mandate era, the shrine provided a space for local Shi’a elites to engage in the nationalist enterprise. In the aftermath of independence, a shrine committee was formed in 1952 to administer and promote ziyārat to the shrine. The politics of Shi’a personal leadership and charismatic authority was critical at the Sayyeda Zaynab, and the Murtadha family was central to propelling the growth of the shrine in the 1950s and 1960s, calling on the support of ‘marja and individual pilgrims as a modern and nationalist expression of devotion. The rise of Hafez al-Assad in 1971, growing popularity of the charismatic Shi’a scholar Musa al-Sadr, and intensifying unrest of Shi’a ulama in Iran and Iraq would have a significant impact on the Sayyeda Zaynab. While Muhsin al-Amīn had first emphasized the Arab heritage of the shrine, by the end of the 1970s rhetoric about Zaynab had framed her as a Shi’i revolutionary. Her shrine became a distinctly sectarian space. This shrine was a space where a modernizing elite, religious authorities, and ordinary pilgrims could enact their vision of the ideal citizen and articulate their Shi’ism in a country where Shi’is represented a small but visible minority. Exploring the Sayyeda Zaynab shrine allows us to read a community being made in an explicitly nationalist context, grappling with growing transnational forces - Islamic reformism, Arabism, and then Shi’a movements - even before the Iranian Revolution.