Syria is majority Sunni Muslim, around 74 percent before the 2011 civil war displaced much of the population, per estimates including Pew Research's Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020, with an Alawite minority near 11 percent historically concentrated on the coast, Christian communities of various ancient rites around 10 percent, and smaller Druze and Twelver Shia populations. Damascus, one of the world's oldest continuously inhabited cities, holds the Umayyad Mosque, built in the eighth century on a site with a long layered religious history as a Roman temple to Jupiter and later a Byzantine church dedicated to John the Baptist, whose head Muslim tradition holds is enshrined within the mosque itself.
Syria's Christian communities, among the oldest in the world, trace continuous presence to the apostolic era, since the road to Damascus is where the New Testament places Paul's conversion, and Syriac-speaking Christian communities preserve liturgical traditions in Aramaic dialects close to the language of Jesus. The Alawites, a heterodox offshoot of Shia Islam with esoteric doctrines historically kept secret from outsiders, rose to disproportionate political power under the Assad family, whose Alawite background shaped decades of sectarian tension within a Sunni-majority state.