Followed by the Arab Spring in 2010, the emergence of the Iranian Green Movement in 2009 heralded a deep transformation within Muslim societies. While a large body of movement literature links the formation of social movement to either the structural opportunities or rational choice theory, the paper addresses a cultural opportunity, particularly religious opportunities, as a main facilitator or constraints in the formation of the movements. Given the fact that mediating between opportunities and concrete mobilization efforts are the shared meanings, the article seeks to empirically investigate the main religious, here Islamic, factors that drive protests. Considering that movements tend to cluster in time and space precisely because they are not independent of one another, the paper goes deep down in the way that a major Islamic event, Ashura, has had an effective impact on later social movements, particularly among the Shiite. In other words, the Muslim revolutionaries have attempted to map their understandings of their own situations onto the general framework first put forward by Ashura as their Master of Protest Frame (MPF). Additionally the weak idea of the state in Islamic political philosophy, along with the importance of ‘Amr bil Marouf and Nahi anil Monkar’, has functioned as an inspiring opportunity for Muslim oppositions to challenge the dominant order. These factors have had a key role in the construction of the collective identity, which shaped the movements’ strategies and was, in turn, shaped at various points over the course of the movements’ evolution. However, Shari’a has not been fully interpreted as the source of opportunity for revolutionaries; rather, the notion of ‘Fitnah,’ along with the appreciated position of order within Islamic Ummah, is in the center of constraints for successful formation of any operation against any dominant regime within Muslim society. Hence, the paper tracks down the effective usage of Islamic rhetoric by the dominant regime, Islamic or Secular, to dismantle and suppress their sub-state rivals. Notwithstanding the regime type, and more importantly the way that people see their regimes’ linkage with Islam do really matter. Finally and to place this theoretical framework in recent events and in a more generalizable analysis we employ a cross-national analysis, with a focus on Iran 2009.