Which Iranian uprising does the Arab Spring bring to mind? The Green Movement of 2009, which challenged the pillars of the Islamic Republic of Iran, or the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which brought the Islamic Republic to power?

As protests swept Tunisia and other Arab countries, prominent Iranians claimed both of the Iranian precedents as inspiration for the Arab uprisings. Mir Hossein Musavi, the Green Movement's leading presidential candidate, suggested that

ʿAli Khameneʾi, self-styled “Supreme Leader” (rahbar-i muʿaẓam) of the Islamic Republic (his actual constitutional title is just rahbar, or leader), begged to differ:

The response from Arab activists to these Iranian claims of influence was: neither. During the first two weeks of Twitter postings with hashtag #Jan25—the main keyword for the Egyptian uprising that began on 25 January 2011—only 69 out of 42,466 tweets referred to Iran, and only 3 of these were in Arabic. Most were postings by Iranians or links to Western news reports, and none gave credit to Iranian precedent.Footnote ³

Still, it was clear that the activists’ sympathies lay more with the Green Movement than with the Islamic Revolution. A survey in Alexandria and Cairo during the week before President Husni Mubarak was ousted found only 18 percent of respondents approving of the Iranian regime, with 47 percent opposing it. (Thirty-six percent of respondents offered no opinion, perhaps a sign of Egypt's lack of interest in Iran.Footnote ⁴) “No to the Mubarak god, no to the Saudi god, no to the Iranian god,” insisted one #Jan25 tweet in Arabic.Footnote ⁵ Another #Jan25 tweet, written in English by a self-identified Egyptian, denounced Iran's involvement in Arab affairs as “a foreign hand” like that of the Americans and Europeans.Footnote ⁶ Wael Ghonim, the Egyptian Google employee and activist who became the international face of the uprising, wore an emerald green wristband during rallies and interviews—an apparent nod to the signature color of Musavi's presidential campaign and the subsequent protests in Iran. Ghonim told Iranian activists that the color “was just a coincidence, but I'm happy you guys made the connection!”Footnote ⁷

Arab activists rejected Khameneʾi's claim that the Arab Spring echoed Iran's Islamic Revolution. A speaker in Cairo's Tahrir Square responded to Khameneʾi, to great applause: “Egypt will not be another Iran. We will not be governed by a religious dictatorship, as in Iran.” The crowd then chanted anti-Iranian slogans.Footnote ⁸ A statement by Egyptian activists denounced Khameneʾi for trying to “drive a wedge in the nation's fabric by talking about an Islamic revolution in an attempt to eliminate our Coptic brothers from our revolution.”Footnote ⁹

The Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's largest Islamist organization, chimed in. Kamal El-Helbawy, a Brotherhood leader in London, thanked Khameneʾi for his support, then said that “conditions of Egypt are completely different from Iran.” The Egyptian revolution “is not an Islamic revolution,” he stressed, and the Brotherhood will respect whatever form of government the Egyptian people choose in future elections.Footnote ¹⁰ At a press conference in Cairo, spokesman Mohamed Morsy went further, rejecting Iranian influence entirely. The Muslim Brotherhood was “not responsible for statements from Iran or Lebanon or elsewhere, and does not want any of them to interfere in Egypt's internal affairs.” The Brotherhood opposes a “religious state,” he continued, “because Islam is against it,”Footnote ¹¹ reaffirming the prodemocracy position that the Muslim Brotherhood has taken in recent years.Footnote ¹²

If the Iranian Green Movement was not the sole or main inspiration for the Arab Spring, as Musavi suggested, it was one of many inspirations, including the whole series of “color revolutions” of the past decade. Sayid Yossif, an Egyptian activist, included the Green Movement in his list of precedents:

“We have learned from you guys,” Ghonim told Iranian activists, “that at the end of the day with the power of people, we can do whatever we want to do.”Footnote ¹⁴ Among the lessons of the Green Movement, it appears, was the tactic of cellphone photography and videography, uploaded to the Internet or forwarded to friends to bypass government censorship. Virtually every image of the Iranian Green Movement included, somewhere in the frame, a picture of someone taking a picture. So, too, in Cairo's Tahrir Square and many other protests of the Arab Spring.

But in some ways, the successful uprisings of the Arab Spring replicated the Iranian Revolution of 1979 more closely than the Green Movement of 2009. They succeeded in overthrowing authoritarian regimes, as the Green Movement did not, and they did so through general strikes, which the Green Movement never managed to spark. During the Iranian Revolution, the general strike was so widespread that the government did not have enough troops to force everybody back to work, and workers in the oil industry shut down the monarchy's primary source of income.Footnote ¹⁵ In Tunisia, strikes began along with demonstrations in mid-December 2010. In Sidi Bouzid, where the uprising began, the regional labor federation announced a general strike for 12 January 2011, pushing the national labor federation—long considered “broken in” by the stateFootnote ¹⁶—to adopt an increasingly confrontational stance, shifting in two weeks’ time from calls for “serene dialogue” (30 December) to “political reforms” (4 January) to “involvement in the contentious movements of popular protest” (11 January).Footnote ¹⁷ The authoritarian president of Tunisia fled on 14 January.

In Egypt, wildcat strikes were so widespread that they threatened the country's food supply. Egypt gets half of its grain from abroad,Footnote ¹⁸ via ports that were shut down entirely for several days in late January and early February and then operated at partial capacity for a week until Mubarak resigned.Footnote ¹⁹ Fuel shortages and curfews disrupted trucking, and the government shutdown of banks and Internet connections further complicated markets. One well-informed observer told me there was a real risk that Cairo might run out of food in a matter of weeks if such conditions continued.

The Iranian Green Movement observed these developments jealously. Musavi and others began to discuss a general strike within two weeks of the disputed presidential election of June 2009,Footnote ²⁰ but never actually announced one, and widespread labor action never materialized. In early 2011, when the Green Movement once again took to the streets, inspired by the Arab Spring, strikes were again sporadic, and they focused on economic rather than political grievances.Footnote ²¹ Some Iranian activists attributed the differing trajectories to greater repression in Iran: “When I compare the situation in Egypt with Iran, [the] Mubarak regime & military are angels,” one Iranian wrote. “People in Egypt get arrested and released the same day while Iran[ian] Election protesters [are] still in prison after 2 yrs.”Footnote ²² Some Egyptians rejected this analysis: “In comparison, the death toll in Iran election protests was 30–80. There's probably that many dead in Alexandria or Suez alone.”Footnote ²³ This debate will no doubt continue in academic circles for some time to come.