UNITED KINGDOM – A fact-checking investigation about the campaign against a Muslim group
A number of high-profile media outlets in the UK recently targeted the Ahmadi Religion of Peace and Light (AROPL), a new religious movement inside Islam, on the basis of declarations made by a former member who launched a cabal against the AROPL and that I will identify as J.A. in this fact-checking article.
The Ahmadi Religion of Peace and Light (AROPL) is a Shia-derivative new religious movement which was founded in 1999 in the chaotic post-Saddam Iraq by Ahmed al-Hassan, a civil engineer born in 1968 in Basra (Iraq). The movement soon expanded to other countries with Sunni or Shia majority populations. It is headed by the Egyptian American national Abdullah Hashem Aba Al-Sadiq.
The new religious movement is not to be confused with the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community founded in the 19th century by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad of Qadian (1835-1908) within a Sunni context, with which it has no relations.
The persecution of AROPL stems from its core doctrinal teachings that diverge from and challenge certain traditional beliefs within Islam. Its members are persecuted as heretics in a number of Muslim majority countries, such as Algeria, Azerbaijan, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Malaysia, Morocco, Turkey… The United Nations, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other NGOs have taken sides with those victims of persecution in those countries.
In the UK, AROPL is a charitable company. In the US, it is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization.
Noteworthy is that as of the end of July 2025, no complaint had officially been lodged against the religious community or its spiritual leader in the UK, or in Sweden and Germany where they had first settled in the last few years.
Who is J.A?
J.A. was a former member of the Ahmadi Religion of Peace and Light for a short period. He frequented the UK headquarters of the Ahmadi Religion of Peace and Light from April 2023 until June 2024 when he was excluded from the community for misbehaviour.
After he had to leave the organization, he started to slander the AROPL online, on Tiktok and Youtube. He created two accounts for this purpose. One by the name “Enlightener” and another one on his own name.
During the first six months of 2025, he spread all sorts of fakes against the AROPL on Tiktok. A few recent examples among many others, such as that phones are hacked when entering the AROPL headquarters in Crewe, that members are required to give their blood before joining the community or that the leader is supported by demons.
This sort of fakes and fantasies generated by J.A. finally filtered through several mainline media in the UK.
Such and other accusations are well-known among experts and organizations monitoring so-called “cult issues” and the narratives of disgruntled former members of religious groups, which very often appear to be unfounded when complaints are filed on the ground of defamation. See a small database of exemplary court decisions collected by HRWF in Belgium, France, Germany and other countries. One of the most recent cases this year took place in Italy where an “anti-cult” organization was convicted of defamation against Soka Gakkai and had to pay their victim over €35,000.
At the end of July 2025, I interviewed J.A.’s brother who lives in the AROPL community in Crewe (UK). J.A. was born into a family of five children, three boys and two girls. Their father and their mother gave them a good picture of marital relationships in their home education. They all lived in Dubai where most of them have taken root. From 2012 to 2023, his relations with the AROPL were exclusively online.
In 2022, he visited the community when it was based in Sweden. When they moved to the UK one year later, he joined them with his wife and their six children. They officially became members of the community and shared their communal life.
Through my conversations with other members of the community, a convergent portrait of J.A. quickly emerged. He was very disrespectful towards his wife he had married many years ago when she was 15. He was publicly considering her poorly intelligent, less than nothing, and he was treating her roughly as a servant, despite the spiritual warnings of other members and the leader of the community. He was also lacking fatherly love, to speak diplomatically, and his children preferred the company of their uncle. Sometimes, he was saying he was Moses or he had received messages from Allah or angels that he should do this and that. He appeared to some of his close coreligionists to be mentally disturbed and occasionally in real spiritual delirium.
When he started to be perceived as a physical threat to the head and the members of the community, it was decided to exclude him from it. However the AROPL took care of this family of six children for a few months during the transition period when they were outside.
A repeatedly rejected marriage proposal, although already married
When J.A. contacted the AROPL community in Sweden, he already made a proposal to get married with Tahani, one of the two adopted daughters of the spiritual leader and his wife. He had of course never seen her before but he was claiming that Allah had revealed him she should be his wife. Tahani, who is now 26, was not interested in such a proposal by a man who was 17-18 years older. The answer of her adoptive father and head of the community Abdullah Hashem was also clear.
When J.A. officially joined the community with his family in the UK, he went on tirelessly harassing her with the same request.
He always claimed that he had received a revelation from God, that Angel Gabriel came down upon him (like he had come upon Prophet Muhammad) and told him to tell Mr Hashem that he HAD to marry Tahani to him, even if she did not want.
I interviewed Tahani, who was born in the UK and has British citizenship. “Every time I was refusing, he had outbursts of anger because I was disobeying Allah but afterwards, he was coming with gifts,” she said. “He was trying to manipulate my religious feelings and treating me as an object of his desires. This was uncomfortable and I was sorry for his wife,” she lamented during our conversation. “He was always trying to be alone with me in places without cameras, a situation I was systematically trying to avoid,” she added. “I was emotionally abused and…,” were her final words which seemed not be really final.
The head of the community said several times to J.A. “I feel like you need to calm down and focus on your family” but this did not change his state of mind.
J.A. finally called him the Antichrist, saying he was seeing the spirit of Satan in him and it was his mission to kill Satan…. Mr Hashem then felt his life was under threat and he expelled him from the community, for the security of all of them.
In short, some media outlets became the propagandists of a person whose patriarchal and misogynistic mindset was confirmed by his behaviour: attempted polygamy, attempted forced marriage, gender harassment, physical threats and religious delirium as perceived by his coreligionists. All threats to the rule of law, social order and peaceful coexistence between belief communities inside Islam in the UK.
It is to be noted again that as of the end of July 2025, no complaint had officially been lodged in the previous years against the religious community or its spiritual leader in the UK, or in Sweden and Germany where they had first settled in the last few years.
By spreading hostility towards the AROPL in the media, J.A. has also attracted the attention of some extremist imams in the UK who are threatening to attack those “heretics,” and hereby to disrupt public order in the country. Moreover, this public message spread in Europe will embolden Muslim majority countries where AROPL members were already persecuted to go on hunting them as “heretics” in total impunity. Is it what we want?
