More than 95,000 Indian Muslims have protested against the presence in India of a Pakistani fugitive Tarek Fatah who has earned notoriety as one of the most shameless Islamophobes by tweeting on a trending hashtag ArrestTariqFatah, a statement said on 25 February.
Usually even six to seven thousand tweets make a hashtag a trend on twitter but for Muslims’ inexperience on twitter #ArrestTarekFatah could become a trend even after 95,000.
In his message from Makkah, Mufti Yasir Nadeem Wajidi, who is there on Umrah pilgrimage and who had initiated the hashtag, has thanked the participants. “We should not be disappointed because our hashtag could not become a trend because we believe in our rewards from Allah and surely the rewards for this are with Allah SWT,” he said.
An earlier hashtag initiated by Mufti Wajidi trended at number six. Before taking on twitter, Mufti Wajidi uploaded eight series of “Fatah ka Fatwa, A Surgical Strike” in which he shattered every allegation made by Tarek Fatah and challenged him for an open debate outside TV studio in the presence of impartial judges.
Trending is the categorisation of a hashtag by the social media site Twitter according to the number of participants discussing a topic on Twitter.
The organisers said that seeing the Islamophobe using their hashtag was their biggest success who used it to swear at Muslims but this way “The coward was inadvertently demanding his own arrest.”
As reports are coming from around the country of FIRs being filed against the Pakistani fugitive, a women demonstration has been planned by a girls madrassa Aisha Siddeeqa Qasimul Uloom Banat in Deoband on 27 February.