In England, Parents Are Moving Their Children Into a Doomsday Cult—With a Man Calling Himself ‘the New Pope’

According to Islamic legend, a messianic figure known as the Mahdi will appear before Judgement Day to vanquish injustice and tyranny, and usher in an era of peace across the world before the apocalypse. Abdullah Hashem, a beanie-wearing American-Egyptian running what can only be described as a quasi-Islamic doomsday cult based out of a former orphanage in the north of England, claims to be that Mahdi, and for good measure “the new Pope.” If you want to join him, you’ll have to cash in your home and give him all your money.


“We are looking for people who are willing to sell their homes and to come and be amongst the community and to follow me, [and to] not waver or want to leave once they’ve come,” Hashem says in one piece of in-house propaganda from earlier this year, wearing his black beanie so low it casts a dark shadow over his eyes. More bluntly, he compares himself to Jesus and says he wants people that will “love” him and be willing to “sacrifice it all to establish a divine, just state.”

His organization is called the Ahmadi Religion of Peace and Light, or AROPL for short. It’s a doomsday cult for the social media age, with members likely running into thousands worldwide. The organization is flooding the internet with an avalanche of slickly produced yet chilling content from a ramshackle broadcast studio based out of its Grade II-listed red brick mansion in Crewe, Cheshire, 35 miles from Manchester. “Accepting this covenant is the only thing that will save you from the punishment that is about to come down on mankind,” Hashem said late last year. “COVID was merely the beginning of that punishment and a precursor. More plagues and diseases will be unearthed and unleashed upon you.”

“He is to me the most important person in the world right now.”

“I was told I was the reincarnated Zeus,” a former member who left AROPL last year told VICE. “When I visited them in Sweden, there was a miracle of thunder.”

Over the span of a decade, he sent Hashem all the money he could to support the cause, opening additional businesses and even taking out a bank loan for more than $200,000. “I needed to trust in whatever he was doing,” the ex-devotee recalls.

Then he joined the group in Crewe, a small town in the north of England best known for a football team that’s been embroiled in a child sexual abuse scandal. “He’s asking for absolute submission,” he says. “I was tricked and scammed, and threatened when I was leaving.”

Those who uproot their lives to join AROPL in-person speak openly about the need for “submission” to succeed within the organization, and unmarried women sometimes find future husbands waiting within its membership, according to video testimonials. At least a dozen children are reportedly being homeschooled at the HQ in Crewe.


Male members, including the group’s security guards, wear dark beanies covering their entire foreheads, almost obscuring their vision, copying Hashem’s dubious style choices (his look has been branded a “2015 Zara starterpack” by online jesters). Footage also shows large groups of men eerily punching their fists into the air during his sermons, which he delivers in a room known as the “basilica” on an elevated podium in front of apocalyptic artwork.