As a high-ranking member of the Syrian Brotherhood, he was involved in the escalating unrest directed against the Ba`thist regime throughout the 1960s and 1970s and played a key role from exile in the latter part of the failed Islamist uprising in Syria of 1976–1982.
Hawwa's father was active in Hawrani's movement and engaged in organizing within the `Aliyliyat neighborhood against rich landowners in addition to participating in the final efforts to expel the French from Syria in 1945.
[9] Al-Hamid was a member of the Naqshabandi Sufi order and a proselytizer of the ideas of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna, whom he had met during a stay in Egypt.
Hawwa also continued his education in Sufism under the tutelage of a number of shaykhs in Damascus, the most notable of whom was `Abd al-Karim al-Rifa`i (Arabic عبد الكريم الرفاعي) of the Zayd Ibn Thabit Mosque.
[12] In particular, al-Rifa`i's idea of "a school in every mosque" shaped Hawwa's thinking regarding the conditions required to ensure a proper religious education for Muslims in the modern age.
[13] Hawwa graduated in 1961 and took posts as a school teacher responsible for religious instruction first in a town in the governorate of al-Hasaka and then in city of Salamiyah near Hama.
Comparing the commentary on the Quran by Hawwa with that of Sayyid Qutb (and early modernists Muhammad Abduh and Rashid Rida), Cook notes that unlike Qutb (and Abduh and Rida) when it comes to commenting on 2:256, Hawwa does not take the opportunity to denounce the misconception of Islam being "spread by the sword", and agrees with early commentators that Christians and Jews must pay tribute to avoid conversion to Islam by.