Any attempt to historicize literary and cultural production from Syria cannot fail to notice the neglect for the role that Islam and Islamism have played, particularly as a model against which canons and critical paradigms of modernity in Ba‘athist Syria have been constructed. The remarkable impact and popularity of Islamist ideologies – in their various conformations and orientations – in Muslim majority countries, particularly its unresolved confrontation with authoritarian regimes in the Arab World, have elicited the interest of political scientists, yet their impact on the literary and creative realms have received considerably little consideration. This is particularly striking if compared with the relevance Arabic literature scholars have assigned to socialist, nationalist and emancipatory ideologies, their influence on modern Arabic literature, and how they have shaped its poetics and themes. Syria is no exception, and from a postcolonial point of view a deeper understanding of the country’s cultural trajectory up until the 2011 Revolution must take into account the struggle between the secular, modernizing ideology of the Ba‘ath party and the increasingly popular Islamist project which have shaped the country’s history and cultural arena in the decades following independence. This paper engages with the works of Zakariyya Tamir and Khalid Khalifa as authors widely acknowledged to have influenced entire generations of Syrian writers and whose novels and short stories have enjoyed wide circulation in Europe and North America. What do creative practitioners and purveyors of culture such as Tamir and Khalifa project as Islamism and what do they make of it? What is the significance of Islamist subjectivities, trajectories, idioms and visions as these are represented in these two authors’ works? In particular, drawing on Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony, as well as Said’s Culture and Imperialism and Covering Islam, this paper looks at the evolution of the supposedly dissident and anti-authoritarian character of Tamir and Khalifa’s work against the backdrop of the modernity vs. Islam split, and their role in this struggle for symbolic power. Motivating this is the desire to explore the extent to which their protagonists deconstruct the secular vs. Islamist dichotomy through which modernization has been traditionally framed in Syria.