What Academics Are Saying About the Recent AROPL Headquarters Raid

It's been a month since the raid which had taken place at the Headquarters of the Ahmadi Religion of Peace and Light in the city of Crewe, England. Today, Abdullah Hashem Aba Al-Sadiq made a Facebook post regarding the appearance of three professors who travelled to the city of Crewe to visit members of the community and to hear directly from them the events of the raid and their personal experiences. The statement is as follows: Following the police raid on Webb House, the community was visited by a number of academics with expertise in the area of new religions, criminal justice, social work and the issue of government raids on minority religions. These were Professors Stuart Wright, Susan Palmer, and Holly Folk.

Stuart A. Wright is a Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Department of Sociology, Social Work and Criminal Justice at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas.

Dr. Wright teaches courses in religion, social movements, and terrorism. He has authored over fifty publications in scholarly books and journals. He is known internationally for his research on religious and political movements, conflict, and violence.

He has published five books, including Armageddon in Waco (University of Chicago Press, 1995), Patriots, Politics, and the Oklahoma City Bombing (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and Saints under Siege: The Texas State Raid on the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints (with James T. Richardson, New York University Press, 2011).

He recently published Storming Zion: Government Raids on Religious Communities, in which he documents a troubling pattern in which governments appear predisposed to use this draconian approach to enforcement against minority religions, even when the parties lodging the grievance claims are unreliable, the allegations are unsupported by facts, and the evidence is questionable or ambiguous.

Susan J. Palmer is an Affiliate Professor at Concordia University and a Lecturer at the School of Religious Studies Faculty at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. She has authored or edited fourteen books on New Religious Movements, notably Children in Minority Faiths (NYU Press 2026), based on a five-year project supported by the Social Sciences and the Humanities Research Council of Canada.

She mostly recently co-authored Storming Zion: Government Raids on Religious Communities with Professor Stuart A Wright, chair of the Department of Sociology, Social Work and Criminal Justice at Lamar University in Texas.

Holly Folk is Professor and Major Advisor in Religion and Culture at Western Washington University, Bellingham, Washington. She has previously taught at Indiana Purdue University and the University of Indianapolis. In 2019, she served as Program Chair for the Association for the Sociology of Religion annual meeting.

She has lectured and published extensively on new religious movements, religion in Eastern Asia, new Christian groups, and communal studies. Her 2017 book “The Religion of Chiropractic: Populist Healing from the American Heartland” (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017) has been favorably reviewed in some of the leading academic journals in her field.

The academics were able to obtain firsthand evidence of the aftermath of the police raid and its impact, and we anticipate that it will form part of their research and publications in the near future. We hope this will help to contextualize the raid and act as a counterweight to serious disinformation circulating in the media and online.

Stuart Wright and Susan Palmer are currently writing a chapter about the raid for a new book, to be published in 2027 about the Ahmadi Religion of Peace and Light, in which they said: "This chapter represents an early analysis of what likely will be recognized as the most massive and militarized raid on a religious community in a Western democratic country in modern history, and as one of the most controversial state operations against a new religious movement in the UK."