The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928 by Ḥassan al-Banna in Ismailyya, Egypt, arose in the midst of the Nahda (enlightenment) movement that flowered in Egypt in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Arab/Muslim Nahda intellectuals, staring down the end of the Ottoman empire and the encroachment European colonizing missions, sought to protect the Arab-Islamic homeland through a deep investigation and analysis of ascendant liberal values in Europe. Nahda scholars -- including Islamic-state inclined scholars -- wrote that European values were both similar to Islamic ethics and the foundations of Islamic Jurisprudence (fiqh) e.g. (Rafaʼa Al-Tahtāwī, 1868, 1873); and essentially different (and better) (e.g. Rashīd Rida, 1930). Scholars have asked whether the Muslim Brotherhood movement can be considered a part of the Nahda movement, and by extension, a natural outgrowth of modernity. The answer seems to be “yes” when the question is asked in this way. After all, they participated fully in debates about how to respond to colonial rule, the anxiety at the heart of the Nahda movement. At the same time, the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood can be read as a reaction to the liberalization of Egyptian society, which made was a condition for the possibility for, according to Hassan al-Banna, Christian missionary activity in Egypt under the auspices of organizations such as the YMCA. (Richard P. Mitchell, 1969). This paper argues that the “alternate modernity” debate fruitfully explains the Muslim Brotherhood’s firm place in the Arab and Muslim story of modernity, but it questions whether the lens of “modernity” is the most useful one to apply to the historiography of the Muslim Brotherhood. This paper suggests an alternative lens, called the “sunnaic paradigm” to ask how al-Banna understood himself fulfilling the Prophet Muhammad’s example (sunnah), how Sayyed Qutb, one of the movement’s most important intellectuals, understood himself in relation to al-Bannah and the Prophet’s sunnah, and how contemporary Muslim Brotherhood polemicists such as Khyarat al-Shāter (b. 1950) or Moḥammad Morsi (b. 1951), now facing unprecedented oppression in Egypt, understand themselves in relationship to their forefathers and the Prophetic sunna. This dialectical approach provides an alternative historiography that might be closer to some of Brothers’ own.