Indonesia Makes ‘Nabi Muhammad SAW’ A Worldwide Trend on Twitter

It is common to see an artist or a rock band’s name featured as a world wide trending topic on Twitter. However, if a name of a religious figure goes onto Twitter’s trending list, there must be something interesting about him. The ‘Nabi Muhammad SAW‘ Twitter trend started this afternoon, by the time this post was  completed, it became the number one trending topic on Twitter.

Muhammad, peace be upon him, is the prophet of Islam. “Nabi” is an Indonesian word for prophet and “SAW” is a popular abbreviation in Indonesia, which means “peace be upon him”. Given the huge Muslim and Twitter population in Indonesia, it is clear that the source of this trending topic came from Indonesia.

How ‘Nabi Muhammad SAW’ became a trending topic?

Today is not a special day for muslims and there are no news in the media about ‘Nabi Muhammad SAW’. It is possibly related to the second trending topic: #20peopleilove. A Twitter trend graph from SalingSilang shows that tweets about #2opeopleilove is rising today.

It is interesting to witness that most people in Indonesia put “Nabi Muhammad SAW” in their list of 20 people that they love. Searching for “#20peopleilove” and “Nabi Muhammad SAW” simultaneously on Twitter clearly proved this fact.

Indonesia is the largest muslim country in the world with 86 percent of its population made up of muslims (that’s about 211 million people). According to a report from SalingSilang, Indonesia is also the third largest nation on Twitter after US and Brazil. It isn’t a surprise that most indonesians would tweet about “Nabi Muhammad SAW” on Twitter and soon it became a worldwide trending topic on the microblog.

Despite some negative association of muslims with terrorism activities, it is relieving that most young muslims in Indonesia still love their prophet. Islam itself is derived from “salaam”, an Arabic word for peace.