CREWE, England — They run one of the largest international doomsday cults in the world.
Through two satellite TV stations, 48 social media channels and YouTube channels in five languages, they reach followers all over the globe, telling them that mankind is mere “hours” away from a “flood of blood.”
One of them has declared himself “the long-awaited savior of mankind” — and more recently, the new Pope — commanding followers to sell their homes and follow him.
They call their movement the “Ahmadi Religion of Peace and Light,” and their beliefs are, to put it mildly, wide ranging. In addition to small bits and pieces of Islam, Ahmadi members are taught about space aliens, the Illuminati, human-sized rabbits that live on other planets and keep humans as pets — the list goes on.
New members are allegedly required to give blood in a loyalty oath to the leader — whom they call “Master” — and he allegedly mixes all the blood in a jar that he keeps inside a replica of the Ark of the Covenant.
The compound from which they operate is a converted orphanage in a small town in Northern England, quite far from where they started out — in Mooresville, Indiana.
Independent journalist Be Scofield of The Guru Magazine broke the story last month detailing the journey of two Mooresville High School graduates — Abdullah Hashem and Joseph McGowen — who went from being just two kids in small town Indiana all the way to the top of a worldwide cult.
Cult busters
Hashem and McGowen graduated from Mooresville High School in 2001. The two of them were natural entertainers — Hashem, in fact, produced the Class of 2001’s senior video, and both of them were known to have performed standup comedy at the Crackers Comedy Club in Broad Ripple.
“We’d like to have a sitcom sort of like Seinfeld,” Hashem told the local newspaper back in the early 2000s. “He’s one of my inspirations.”
The duo spent much of the 2000s, however, not on sitcoms, but on documentary films largely focused around one theme: exposing cults.
While Hashem was studying filmmaking at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis in 2005, he and McGowen infiltrated the Rael cult — a UFO religion founded in France in the 1970s — for a documentary film called Little Claudy.
The film actually made quite a stir — Hashem and McGowen were interviewed about their movie by Angela Ganote on FOX 59 before its debut at IUPUI, and national outlet WIRED picked up the story when the cult decided to sue the filmmakers and the university for defamation in 2007.
After Little Claudy, Hashem and McGowen made a film about the leader of a Black Hebrew Israelite movement in Las Vegas who claimed he could summon UFOs in the sky. Hashem told reporters at the time that the two of them were working to “slay these dragons” and debunk “false prophets.” McGowen made similar remarks.
“I want this out there so parents can see what’s going on and protect their kids,” McGowen said.
Former manager editor of The Reporter-Times and current Morgan County Council member Brian Culp wrote multiple stories about Hashem and McGowen’s film career back in the 2000s, and he spoke to The Correspondent last week about what he remembered.
“They seemed to me to be very genuine about wanting to expose cults,” Culp said. “They were just local kids doing something interesting. Years later, I heard things had gone off the rails, but I didn’t look into it too deeply.”
Things indeed went off the rails, starting in 2008 when the duo allegedly had a falling out, and Hashem made a documentary called The Arrivals, which sought to bring the “New World Order” to light and claimed most major pop stars were “tools for the Illuminati.”
A natural leader
There’s a small article dedicated to Hashem in the Mooresville High School 2001 Wagon Trails yearbook. On it, the then 18-year-old received an interestingly mixed assessment from MHS staff members.
“As a student, he was very entertaining, but it was good to see over the year for him to gain a balance between academics and his creativeness,” said then-MHS government teacher Joyce Gilly.
Then-assistant principal Bruce Peters had a different assessment.
“(Hashem) is one that will go out of his way to pester or pass a project on to someone else,” Peters said.
Hashem was born in 1983 to an Egyptian father and an American mother. He met McGowen in high school where they built a friendship based on filmmaking and comedy.
Gilly, now retired from Mooresville High, spoke with The Correspondent this week about her memories of Hashem when he was her student more than two decades ago. In local news coverage of Hashem and McGowen from 20 years ago, Hashem more than once cited Gilly as someone who meant a lot to him, and he even invited her and some other teachers to his film screenings in college.
“He was very funny and charismatic,” Gilly said. “A natural born leader. People followed him. His creative ability at the time stuck out to me. Everyone knew him — he would always stand up for the underdog.”
Gilly had a vivid memory of Hashem once defending a girl with special needs who was being made fun of by another student. She also remembers him as a prankster who was very smart, despite middling grades.
But — and Gilly stresses this — she hasn’t seen Hashem since he was in college.
“If you would have called and told me he was the head of a big film company, I would have believed that,” Gilly said. “But (Hashem being a cult leader) surprises me. Anything can happen in 20 years, I guess. But there is no connection between the Abdullah I knew and this person you’re talking about.”
From Mooresville to Messiah
Hashem returned to Egypt in 2008 — possibly due to the Rael cult lawsuit — and soon after joined some other young men who followed the Iraqi Ahmed al-Hassan, a self-proclaimed messiah.
McGowen also traveled to Egypt at some point and began following al-Hassan.
Eventually, Hashem set off on his own and launched a splinter group, initially called the Black Banners of the East.
Over the years, Hashem and his followers have travelled from country to country, eventually becoming known as the Ahmadi Religion of Peace and Light. In the mid 2010s, they were established in Germany before moving on to Sweden in 2019. There, they attempted to establish a utopian community, but were eventually threatened with deportation due to alleged drug use. In the wake of this, they relocated to Northern England in 2022.
The group and its offshoots throughout the world have been subject to frequent harassment by local authorities, which ironically has likely bolstered their popularity. At the very least, the persecution of the group has led to some outside sympathy — in the summer of 2023, the United Nations released a statement urging the Turkish government not to deport the group’s members.
“Since the inception of the Ahmadi Religion of Peace and Light in 1999, its members have been labelled as heretics and infidels and are often subjected to threats, violence and legal detention,” UN experts said in the statement. “They are particularly at risk of detention due to blasphemy laws, in violation of their right to freedom of religion or belief.”
The statement takes the group’s written history at face-value, which claims Ahmed al-Hassan appeared in Iraq in 1999 as a messenger to the Mahdi, or messiah. In reality, Hashem was a sophomore at Mooresville High in 1999, and al-Hassan had never met him.
At the same time Ahmadi members have undergone persecution for their beliefs, the group’s finances have never been better. In 2023, the group earned $1.4 million in donations, and they hold assets worth more than $4 million.
“We’re looking for people that are willing to sell their homes, come be a part of the community, and follow me,” Hashem says in a video message to his followers. “Leave behind (your) own lives of self-interest, and support God with (your) wealth.”
The rest of the story
Be Scofield’s original story “Meet the Doomsday Cult Taking Over the World” at gurumag.com/meet-the-doomsday-cult-taking-over-the-world/.
Editor’s Note: Some lines have been edited to reflect that claims against the Ahmadi Religion of Peace and Light are allegations.
