Writing in the op-ed section of the Beirut-based French language newspaper, Le Jour, the Aleppine lawyer, constitutional thinker and political activist Edmond Rabbath likened the communal and sectarian politics of Syria to a “régime de cloisons étanche” – an evocative phrase indicating a system of impermeable membranes. Indeed, by the final decade of the French Mandate on Syria, political representation and contestation had become dominated — legally and practically — by forms of ethnic, religious and linguistic identification. This was reinforced by forms of legal practice that fell along sectarian lines. For Rabbath, this system, which he saw as equally an inheritance of an anti-modern Ottoman politics, a feature of French colonial oppression, and a key tool of the Ottoman-Arab Syrian elite had forestalled the formation of a secular Syrian national citizenship to the detriment of Muslims and non-Muslims alike. This paper revisits the 1920s and 30s-era debate about citizenship in the French Mandate through the Arabic and French-language writings of Rabbath to argue that the idea of secular liberal citizenship has been a substantial — though often suppressed — current in Syrian political thought for nearly a century. By returning to this question of secular citizenship and its viability in that body of thought, this paper will move to examine the parallels, perhaps the better concept here is shadows, of this debate in the current revolutionary and minority-based discourse of the conflict in Syria.