Historical novels in Syria have often been read as alternative histories to “official ones;” pushing aside the theater of history to reveal behind-the-scenes prosaic experiences of historical events, at times revealing ruins, at others championing heroes. More often than not, as contemporary scholars remind us, historical fiction tells us as much about the present as it does the past. In Saba Mahmood’s study of the Egyptian church’s reaction to Zeidan’s Azazeel, she demonstrates, among other things, how a work of historical fiction triggers various kinds of recognition in its audience, depending on where one might be located within the social continuum. “A work of historical fiction does not place past events indifferently on a blank canvas but works to induce recognition among its readers,” she writes. Taking this assertion as an entryway, this paper will discuss how a number of Syrian authors’ philosophical approach to engaging history instill their narratives concurrently with detachment and affect. Disarming historical continuities with the present, these narratives reject totalizing representations of reality (of the past), but instead, coerce the reader to imagine, from a philosophical perspective, the principles of the realities construed in them in both the past and the present. If, before 2011, the grammar of Syrian cultural discourse for the most part was negotiated through a dialectic with the state, reading these works with an eye to their philosophical discourse, may bring us closer to the salient issues these authors evoke through their inter-involvement of philosophy to the narrative.