The history of the Middle East in World War I has been recounted in Arabic as well as English and French primarily in military terms, with a focus on battles at Gallipoli and in the Arab Revolt, and on the armed resistance to the Paris Peace Conference in Turkey, Iraq, and Syria. Efforts at diplomatic peace have been dismissed as failures and therefore inconsequential and misguided. This paper revisits the postwar “Wilsonian Moment”, as Erez Manela termed it, without the distortion of hindsight to uncover the vigorous peace campaign led by a prominent Syrian politician and intellectual, Sheikh Rashid Rida. Articles published in his widely read Islamic journal, al-Manar, as well as his diary and personal correspondence, reveal that Rida embraced liberal principles as the foundation of peace and a new, egalitarian, and law-based world order and that he conducted a sustained campaign for a diplomatic peace between 1918 and 1923. This paper argues that Rashid Rida’s effort, shared by other Arab politicians, was indeed consequential. Rida was a primary player in the establishment of a constitutional, democratic monarchy in Syria that demonstrated Arabs’ capability for self-government against European projects of colonization. This postwar “democratic moment” in Damascus was, however, deliberately erased from the public record after the French destroyed the Syrian Arab Kingdom in 1920. In response, Rida traveled to Geneva to lodge a legal appeal against the French mandate at the League of Nations. He still believed that Muslims and European liberals shared universal principles of law and justice that could assure peace between the East and the West. The failure of that appeal-- and the subversion of international law and Wilson’s principles by the leaders of the Paris Peace Conference and League of Nations-- had a profound impact on Syrian-Arab politics, laying the ground for anti-liberal movements and political violence. Before his death in 1935 Rida published an Islamic vision of world peace that reflected elements of Wilsonianism. The Muhammadan Revelation argued European liberalism had failed its universal promise and that the world’s hope for peace now lay with Islam. The paper concludes that unearthing this unknown history of civilian activism opens new perspectives on the relationship of Islam to democracy and to peacebuilding. This history is needed not only to counterbalance the hyper-focus on violence in contemporary Arab history, but also to guide today’s generation of activists for justice.