List of Famous people born in Damascus Governorate, Syria

ʿĀ’ishah bint Yūsuf al-Bāʿūniyyah was a Sufi master and poet. She is one of few medieval female Islamic mystics to have recorded their own views in writing, and she "probably composed more works in Arabic than any other woman prior to the twentieth century". 'In her the literary talents and Ṣūfi tendencies of her family reached full fruition'. She was born and died in Damascus.

Shukri al-Quwatli was the first president of post-independence Syria. He began his career as a dissident working towards the independence and unity of the Ottoman Empire's Arab territories and was consequently imprisoned and tortured for his activism. When the Kingdom of Syria was established, Quwatli became a government official, though he was disillusioned with monarchism and co-founded the republican Independence Party. Quwatli was immediately sentenced to death by the French who took control over Syria in 1920. Afterward, he based himself in Cairo where he served as the chief ambassador of the Syrian-Palestinian Congress, cultivating particularly strong ties with Saudi Arabia. He used these connections to help finance the Great Syrian Revolt (1925–1927). In 1930, the French authorities pardoned Quwatli and thereafter, he returned to Syria, where he gradually became a principal leader of the National Bloc. He was elected president of Syria in 1943 and oversaw the country's independence three years later.

Mohammed Dib Zaitoun is the current head of the Syrian General Security Directorate and a close adviser of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. He is one of many officials sanctioned by the European Union for their actions against protesters participating in the Syrian civil war.

Salah al-Din al-Bitar was a Syrian politician who co-founded the Arab Ba'ath Party with Michel Aflaq in the early 1940s. As students in Paris in the early 1930s, the two formulated a doctrine that combined aspects of nationalism and socialism. Bitar later served as prime minister in several early Ba'athist governments in Syria but became alienated from the party as it grew more radical. In 1966 he fled the country, lived mostly in Europe and remained politically active until he was assassinated in 1980.

Gregory III Laham, B.S., Emeritus Patriarch of Antioch and All the East, of Alexandria and Jerusalem, is the former spiritual leader of the Melkite Greek Catholic Church. He was elected on November 29, 2000, succeeding Patriarch Maximos V Hakim. He retired on May 6, 2017.