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My email to Holly Folk


 

Dear Dr. Folk,

I am writing in response to your recent appearance in the video titled “AROLP, Cult Accusations & the Fight for Religious Freedom” (YouTube, 7 July 2025), where you appear as a guest alongside representatives of the group known as the Ahmadi Religion of Light and Peace (AROLP).

As an independent scholar, translator, and long-standing spiritual practitioner—deeply engaged in comparative mysticism and critical cult studies—I found your participation in this video deeply troubling. AROLP is not merely a minority religion under scrutiny; it is, as I and others have documented, an algorithmically-driven ideological startup exhibiting many hallmarks of coercive control, spiritual gaslighting, and digital radicalization masked under post-Islamic language.

Over the past months, I have publicly released extensive documentation concerning AROLP’s activities—including a recent attempted infiltration of my life by a woman possibly affiliated with a local subcontractor representing the group under a false identity, which led to an attempted emotional, spiritual, and reputational destabilization which was luckily thwarted. I believe this event formed part of a pattern of psychological entrapment and informational gathering that mirrors tactics employed by other new religious movements CESNUR (that you are also affiliated with) has historically defended.

Please see these public records of concern:

These experiences, supported by further documentation, suggest that AROLP operates not merely as a spiritual group but as a digitally engineered cultic framework embedded in broader soft-power and epistemic control mechanisms.

Your affiliation with CESNUR is of course well known, and I am familiar with the complex debates around religious freedom, stigma, and the term “cult.” However, as critics such as Luigi Corvaglia, Steve Hassan, and others have observed, CESNUR’s work often crosses a line from scholarly defense into active laundering of authoritarian religious systems.

Hence, I ask respectfully:

  • Were you fully aware of the nature of AROLP before agreeing to appear?

  • Were you provided with independent sources or testimonies of those harmed by its activities?

  • Do you not see a conflict between legitimate defense of minority religions and the enabling of digitally cloaked coercion and grooming?

I hope you are someone who values scholarly integrity and are not merely another ideologically captured mouthpiece in the Academy for imperial soft power subterfuge. I hope this message prompts further inquiry. I also append my two monographs regarding the group.

Sincerely,
 N. Wahid Azal


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