Comparative scholarship on French colonialism has shown how certain preconceived notions of religion and ethnicity informed the politics of divide and rule in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. French colonial administration in early-twentieth century Syria and Lebanon was predicated on reductive conceptions of the social and religious diversity of the country. The privileging of minority communities under the Mandate, especially the `Alawis of northwest Syria, has been extensively studied with respect to military conscription, political organization, and bureaucratic policies. Less attention has been placed, though, on the cultural imagination of sectarian and religious difference in twentieth-century Syria and Lebanon. As an esoteric and secretive religious community, the mores and practices of the ʿAlawis served as fodder for fantasy and speculation by scholars, journalists, and other visitors to modern Syria. This paper considers the writing of early-twentieth century French travelers, scholars, journalists, and novelists alongside literary texts by Syrian writers that directly engage with questions of cultural memory in the ʿAlawi community in Mandate Syria and after. By situating the ways in which those earlier foreign observers struggled to comprehend this community against more recent attempts to narrate the history of the ʿAlawis through fiction, this paper contributes to this panel in its collective effort to provide a fuller understanding of religion, sectarianism and social difference in modern Syria.