Rami G. Khouri, editor-at-large for the Lebanese Daily Star asks why Arabs do not revolt against their governments when faced with similar circumstances to those in Iran:
One possible explanation for why discontented Iranians or Turks try to capture and reconfigure their state governance machinery, while Arabs tend to avoid it and simply build their own parallel structures, may have to do with the most basic factors of nation and state legitimacy, efficacy and credibility. Iran and Turkey enjoy powerful, ancient legitimacy as nation-states, while most Arab countries do not, because most of them are modern creations of brazen, slightly eccentric, Euro-colonialists.
Rather than wanting to manage the very difficult socio-economic challenges that define countries like Yemen, Egypt, Syria, Morocco, Algeria and Sudan, it is much more attractive for discontented political and social movements to carve out a space for themselves in society, mostly ignore the central government, and get on with the business of catering to the needs of their constituents. Consequently, central governments in most Arab countries beyond the oil states are finding that their impact and footprint in society are slowly narrowing, in line with their often-diminished legitimacy. Arab regimes to a large extent are not being challenged by their own people, they are being contained and shrunk.
This, I think, offers only a partial explanation. It is true that parallel social institutions do work as a form of redress against unpopular governments in the Middle East, but the article ignores its relevance to the Iranian situation. Prior to 1979 the clergy were in many ways the parallel institutions of the country, yet they ended up assuming control of the state. A similar situation could be said to have emerged in Gaza and elsewhere. Thus the difference in Iran is that Iranians do not have a parallel set of religious institutions to avail themselves of, and in a reversal of roles, those institutions are now the source of disaffection. A new civic space needed to be carved out for Iranians.
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