The second chapter provides a brief description of the Sunni political Islam as an ideology with a focus on its historical provenances of Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and its diffusion to the broader MENA region. This chapter gives an overview of the psycho-biographies of individual Muslim Brotherhood leaders: Mohamed Morsi, Rashid Ghannouchi, and Khaled Mashal. The authors discuss the operational code analysis results and deliberate on what kind of generic foreign policy behavior and strategies we should expect from the Sunni political Islamist leaders. The chapter also sheds light on what these results and strategies mean for MENA politics. The chapter concludes that despite the conventional portrayal of Muslim Brotherhood leadership, these leaders resort to negotiation and cooperation to settle their differences, hence the best way to approach them is to engage in a Rousseauvian assurance game that emphasizes international social cooperation.

After 84 years of struggle, the Muslim Brotherhood rose to prominence in Egyptian politics in the wake of the Arab uprisings. On the night of his election, Mohamed Morsi promised to unite all Egyptians – Muslim and Christians, men and women – and to advance the revolutionary cause for democracy, human rights, and dignity. Over the next 365 days, rather than uniting and democratizing his country, he alienated large segments of the population through exclusionary politics, majoritarianism, and polarization. Why did the Muslim Brotherhood follow majoritarian and polarizing politics after coming to power? This chapter seeks to solve this puzzle by way of unpacking the Brotherhood’s internal power dynamics and disagreements regarding democratic politics. To that end, the chapter begins with a short historical account, tracing the Brotherhood’s changing relationship to politics and emerging splits within. Then, it turns to the shifting power balance between the old guard and liberal Islamists, and how the former sidelined the latter. The chapter discusses three critical episodes in this process: the Wasat Party initiative of 1996, the 2009–10 internal elections, and the post-2011 purge of the liberals. It concludes with a discussion of what the old guard’s perception of democracy looks like in action with details from Morsi’s year in presidency.