NEW DELHI: Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, the father of Lieutenant General Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, who currently serves as the 22nd Director General of Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), the powerful media wing of the Pakistan Armed Forces, served as a senior official at the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC) for over thirty years before reaching his professional peak as the Director of the Directorate of Nuclear Power in Islamabad during the mid-1980s.
It was during this period that he authored his defining work, “Mechanism of the Doomsday: The Ultimate Fate of the Universe,” presented as Paper No. 481. This document is far from a standard technical study; it serves as a primary record of how a high-ranking nuclear engineer, who managed critical projects like the Khushab plutonium reactor, Pakistan’s first indigenous nuclear reactor, believed he could decode the physical end of the world through the lens of Islamic scripture.
Mahmood argued that doomsday is not an unpredictable accident but a calculated divine scheme governed by “pre-set rules” that can be predicted if one correctly analyzes the variables found in the Quran.
The core of Mahmood’s paper is a literalist mapping of modern cosmology onto specific Quranic verses. He based his theory of a finite universe on Verse 55:26, asserting that all matter must perish and eventually return to its original state of high-density energy. He proposed that the current expansion of the universe—which he claimed was explicitly foretold in Verse 51:47—would inevitably transition into a contraction phase.
Drawing from Verse 21:104, he described this collapse as the heavens being “rolled up” like a recorder rolls up a written scroll, leading to a universal implosion he identified as the “Major Event”. Mahmood viewed these astronomical phenomena not as secular occurrences but as the “Divine Will” in motion, where the sounding of the “Soor,” or the trumpet, represents the physical threshold where expansion turns into a violent, chaotic collapse.
Mahmood’s analysis extended to a localized “Doomsday on Earth,” which he theorized would be triggered by a “great crash” with an extra-terrestrial body, such as a giant asteroid, pushing the planet toward the sun. He asserted that this orbital shift would lead to the sun “snatching” Earth’s moon and causing the oceans to catch fire—a phenomenon he attributed to the ignition of internal petroleum and methane reserves triggered by violent volcanic activity, as he interpreted from Verse 82:3-4.
Most strikingly, Mahmood posited that this destruction would occur precisely when human civilization reaches a “High Technology Period”.
He claimed that by this time, humans would have befriended “jinns”—whom he described as “energy beings”—and would attempt to use their combined “power” to escape Earth’s fate through deep space travel. However, he cited Verse 55:33 to argue that such escape attempts would be futile, as those fleeing would be destroyed by cosmic heat and brass flashes. He even detailed an “After Universe” where Paradise is structured like electronic orbits around an atom, requiring souls to have the correct “spiritual energy” to occupy specific levels.
The seamless mixing of nuclear engineering and radical prophecy in this paper provided the ideological context for Mahmood’s later transition from a celebrated state scientist to an internationally sanctioned extremist.
After receiving high accolades for his work, he retired from the PAEC in 1999 following a public disagreement over the nation’s movement toward nuclear test bans. He subsequently founded Ummah Tameer-e-Nau (UTN), a radical organization that led to his 2001 detention by Pakistani authorities under intense international pressure. Investigations revealed that Mahmood had held multiple meetings in Afghanistan with Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, during which he reportedly provided information on the infrastructure needed for a nuclear weapons program and discussed the development of weapons of mass destruction.
Despite his placement on the United Nations Sanctions List for his Al-Qaeda ties, his family’s proximity to power remains a fixture of the Pakistani state as is evident from the present position of his son. He became the media manager of the ISI and the GHQ in December 2022.
In July 2024, it was announced that Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan would now be described by Pakistani government agencies as “Fitna al-Khawarij.” Fitna al-Khawarij refers to the sedition caused by the Kharijites, an early Islamic group that emerged during 650 CE after they broke away from the army of Ali, Prophet Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law.
