The dominant western narrative that described the Syrian conflict as that of a “tyrant killing his own people” suffered from a fatal misunderstanding of the sectarian and political structure of Syrian society. That Western diagnostic failure led to recurrent false predictions of an imminent collapse of the regime, which in turn emboldened the armed groups fighting it and prolonged the conflict. For more than a millennium, the tradition of attributing infidelity (takfīr) and apostasy (irtidād) to religious communities that did not conform to the dominant Sunna orthodoxy led, in the best case, to their marginalization. Those marginalized communities, including the Alawis of Syria, lived through circumstances of extreme uncertainty and hardship and faced long-term challenges for survival. This paper suggests that the Syrian regime’s resistance to political reform prior to the Arab Spring uprisings and its recent resilience in withstanding the overwhelming economic, political, and lethal means deployed to topple it cannot be explained without a grounding in the historical roots of the ongoing conflict. Placing the Syrian uprising in its historical context provides an alternative interpretation of events from the perspective of those marginalized communities. These groups saw both the initial emergence of protests from mosques and the subsequent foreign arming of rebels as attempts to settle the unfinished battles of 1979–1982 between the Alawi-led regime of those perceived as apostates and infidels by the self-proclaimed faithful among the Sunna majority. This paper argues that the sectarian conflict between the religious groups in Syria was generated by the Middle Eastern cultural model that prioritizes religious identity over other social identities. Larger or more powerful groups demanded the conformity of smaller or weaker ones to symbolic representations of their identities and associated beliefs and value systems. Those demands were reinforced by prejudicial attitudes, which in turn were transmitted through intra- and intergroup interaction. Viewing nonconformists as apostates and infidels inhibited assimilation, providing fertile ground for recurrent violent sectarian conflict. Accordingly, while the ongoing Syrian conflict was preceded by a matrix of prevailing social, political, and economic conflicts, violence nevertheless proceeded along religious lines. Because of the Syrian people’s prioritization of their sectarian identities, those who shared the religious identity of the ruling elites were judged as complicit in the elite’s transgressions and even responsible for conflicts of a secular nature. This logic transmitted grievances along religious lines, so that even secular disputes escalated into religious conflict.