By the time French troops withdrew from Syria in 1946, Arab nationalism had become an ideology dominant among differing different sects, classes and regions, and the Arab Revolt of 1916 had come to be seen as a national awakening. Yet recent scholarship covering the thirty years between these two events demonstrates that the adoption of Arab nationalism by Syria’s population was not a linear process, but a fraught, contested one, in which elites were forced to navigate several simultaneously-developing political possibilities. The 1926 elections in Aleppo, an often-overlooked episode during the “Great Syrian Revolt,” illustrate a key moment in this process. The ethnically, linguistically and religiously heterogeneous population of Aleppo received the forces of the Arab Revolt in October 1918, and the nationalist ideology they carried, with deep ambivalence. As the French encroached on the city in 1919, the city’s elites split between support for the French Mandate and an anti-French movement led by the notable Ibrahim Hananu, waged with Turkish support in the name of the “paramount Islamic caliphate.” Forty percent of Aleppo’s voters participated in an election organized by the French in 1923, despite a nationalist boycott. Yet three years later, when the French staged elections for a national constituent assembly in the midst of a revolt in Syria’s south, nationalists succeeded in organizing a boycott among Aleppo’s Muslim residents. Muslim notables, including Hananu, circulated a handbill charging that the vote was a plot to “divide the nation,” while in the view of the American Consul in Aleppo, “The Christians believe that one of the first acts of the assembly will be to vote the separation of Aleppo from Damascus,” and planned to vote accordingly. Thus, the 1926 elections illuminate a moment when Aleppo’s Muslim leadership was enjoining loyalty to “the nation,” while the city’s new Christian middle classes were struggling to articulate a political future in which they would not be marginalized. A close examination of this moment will further our understanding of how once-recalcitrant Aleppo came to adopt the ideology of the Arab Revolt, and the roles that class and sectarian commitments played in that process. This paper will rely on contemporary U.S. State Department cables from Aleppo held at the National Archives in Maryland, as well as British Foreign Office cables and local periodicals from the period. Secondary works by James Gelvin, Keith Watenpaugh, Philip Khoury, Benjamin White and Daniel Neep will also be utilized.