Existing scholarship has documented the extent to which Sunni Islamists enjoy a unique advantage in electoral settings in the Middle East (Camet and Luong, 2014), whether due to their ability to implement social welfare networks (Brooke, 2019), their skill in attracting followers on the basis of a religious ideology which governments are hesitant to repress (Gause, 1994), or their power to play on religiosity to mobilize electoral support (Lust, Kao, and Okar, 2021). Immediately after the Arab Spring, as Islamist parties made historic gains in Egypt and Tunisia, Sunni Islamism, specifically linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, came to be viewed as the primary mode of political opposition in the Middle East. In the intervening years, however, the Muslim Brotherhood has been designated a terrorist organization in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, and Western states including the UK and US have considered designated it a terrorist group as well. What was once considered an advantage, then, seems to have become a political liability, as the Muslim Brotherhood’s brand has become increasingly associated with majoritarian practices in electoral settings and radical Islamist movements in government-produced rhetoric. In this paper, we seek to interrogate ways in which what had previously been the premiere Sunni Islamist brand has now become a scarcely viable political identity. In examining this question, we also examine the extent to which any Islamist advantage or disadvantage exists solely in the Sunni sphere or extends to independent Shii movements, which have until now remained woefully understudied in the field.