Since 1967, Syrian political writers have sought to identify the cause of “Arab defeat” through reference to their own religious traditions. In his Critique of Religious Thought (1969), Sadik Jalal al-Azm argued that religious thinking is not only contrary to scientific thinking, but also reinforces existing rules and orders, thus hindering all political and social liberation. In his work The Immutable and the Transformative (1975), Adonis similarly argued that “religious knowledge”, as typically expressed in the ideas of Ibn Taymiyya, underpins an “immutable culture”, which is in turn linked to Arab authoritarianism. According to Adonis, this culture is characterized by a mystical and nostalgic way of thinking, as well as by a separation between meaning and word. As such, it favors authoritarian regimes that reject diversity and intellectual difference. These two writers, who represented educated Syrian opinion at this time, even if they differed in some respects, basically expressed similar points of view: a theological way of thinking, supported by a belief in the “uniqueness of truth”, is totally inconsistent with modernity, freedom and democracy. By contrast, Burhan Ghalioun was less critical of religion in his work Critique of Politics: State and Religion (1991). In opposition to those who ascribe the cause of Arab decline to Islam, his analysis focuses rather on the distinct historical processes through which the state and religion developed, and whereby the former eventually came to overwhelm and dominate the latter, especially after the era of the Rightly Guided Caliphs. As Ghalioun notes, the reduction of all causes to “religious culture” runs the risk of essentialism, while overlooking the specific logic of politics, as operative in every country of the world. In fact, the political experience of the Arab world during the mid-20th century teaches us that “secular states” covertly reproduced authoritarianism rather than realizing true democracy. In the words of Yasin al-Haj Saleh, since the 1970s, Ghalioun has “synthesized two different positions: self-criticism of secularism and criticism of authoritarian regimes which do nothing but lie”. In my presentation, I would like to examine how Syrian political thinkers have analyzed the different logics of politics and religion, thus identifying an alliance between secularism and authoritarianism.