We could write a book about this, but I’ll try to summarize. I know you are talking about Syria, but the biggest example of this was and is Egypt, and I name Egypt because in the ideological and cultural movements of the Arab and Muslim world it has been arguably the most influential. The ideological environment in the 50s in Egypt and other Arab countries has its roots in the Nahda, a period of Islamic reformism and development of culture centered mostly in Egypt, Lebanon and Syria at the end of the XIX century that called for a modernization of Arab culture and that created a lot of cultural and literature movements all through the Arab world. The ideas of reformation of the Arab world were central for all the independence movements from the imperial powers that grew in the course of the XX century and in the 50s Egypt and other countries and helped overthrow the colonialist powers and the old monarchs. The main example is Nasser in Egypt, that took power in 1952 with a coup. Nasser movement combined the ideals of reformation, panarabism, socialism and anti-imperialism, shared with the Ba’ath party in Syria. During the 50s, Nasser was considered a hero of the Arab independence, especially after the nationalization of the Suez Canal, and pushed for a modernization of Arab society. Already from the end of the 50s, Nasser started to crumble. The union between Egypt and Syria started in 1958 crumbled, Egypt lost the six days wars and ideologically it started to lose power. The thing with the Nasser and other similar presidents that came to power in those years was that while they pushed for a modernization of the country, they represented authoritarian powers that eliminated all dissent and the conditions of poor people didn’t increase. Plus, the western powers did everything to stop these ideals. Gradually, Egypt and many Arab countries started to have a young generation with no hope and no future, high unemployment, and a state that killed or imprisoned whoever questioned their policies, so they felt betrayed by the ideals of freedom and the promises of the leaders of their countries after independence. Conservative Islam political movements started to gain support in the poor neighborhoods of the excluded by society, like the Muslim Brotherhood, that built schools, hospitals, mosques etc in the poor neighborhoods. These people felt excluded by the political process and the economical structure. It’s important to consider that the west NEVER supported the modernist regimes and it always supported the conservative old monarchies like Saudi Arabia. From the end of the 70s, then, the influence of Saudi Arabia grew even bigger. The saudis opened wahhabi schools, mosques etc all around the Muslim world pushing their extremist ideals that had an impact inside the society, to counter the influence of the Iranian revolution of 1979 and to expand its own power. Obviously the Saudi wahhabi influence pushed the whole Arab society towards a more conservative view of Sunni Islam, just like Iran pushed Shias towards a more conservative view of Shia Islam. In the end of the 70s, then, the conservative movements in political Islam turned even more powerful and violent with the camps in Pakistan, set up by USA, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, that trained jihadists to combat URSS in Afghanistan and people from all over the Muslim world were radicalized there and then went back to their own country, to expand conservative political Islam and violent groups. This process is still ongoing and there are a lot of other things that could be taken into consideration or dynamics that happened, but in general conservative Islam is winning the ideological battle. This is why when we see Middle East countries in the 50s or even later, they seem more “westernized” than what we see today.

I don’t have a source here because there’s really a lot of books talking about these dynamics and I don’t have here in this quarantine a book that talks ONLY about this, I hope my comment doesn’t get canceled because all these dynamics can be easily verified and there’s plenty of books that address these topics starting from different points of view and countries. For example, we could talk about Iran and the impact of the 1979 revolution and its impact in Shias and other Muslims; the exclusion that people felt in ex colonies, especially the French ones in North Africa, where the elites continued to be influenced by French culture and the Arab culture looked down; the influence of the whole palestine israel conflict. Etc.