I am currently looking into the self proclaimed Quranist Sam Gerrans.
Not sure what to conclude, he rejects Hadiths wholesale like vast majority of members of free-minds.org, but I feel uneasy with him, he looks strongly like he benefitted from free-minds.org before he did his own translation of Qur'an.
I am looking into it, I tried to interact with him on his belief of Flat Earth but he strongly refused writing he is not prepared to debate the issue with me because he is too busy.
What irks me is that he never gave any acknowledgement to free-minds.org for the material he has built & the podcasts he is posting on YouTube, was he ever a member of free-minds, & split?
Latest that annoyed me was his translation of munafiqeen, he translates it as waverers, this is my response verbatim to him in the podcast where it occurred:
I am slowly going through your podcasts and am enjoying it, The God Protocol need to relisten to the Moses part. In here just a small comment, why do you translate munafiqeen as waverers, as a native speaker of Arabic I have always known it is hypocrites, & they are pretty much badly chastised by Allah who says that they will be confined to the lowest rung of hell “al daraqi al asfali min alnar.”
OK I listened until the end, in Arabic waverer is mudhabdhab, not munafiq, a synonym for waverer in English is undecided, in French waverer translates as indecis, which is again undecided.
Hypocrite is much worse, there is a darkness in the hypocrite, the undecided could be reasoned with & maybe brought back, waverer is not as evil as hypocrite.
So to me munafiq clearly translates as hypocrite, I can even cite a Jewish woman thinker who defined the hypocrite beautifully -
Hannah Arendt “As witnesses not of our intentions but of our conduct, we can be true or false, and the hypocrite's crime is that he bears false witness against himself. What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.”
A good translation for hypocrite & munafiq is also deceiver.
Finally, I have decided to start a thread on Free-Minds.org as an OpEd to your claims in your podcast - it's here -
https://free-minds.org/forum/index.php?topic=9611283.0https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wd0ITJk1uVcAnother podcast is "The God Protocol" where he extracts an oft repeating pattern of God's Sunna/Practice which I found interesting, still digesting it, I must admit he puts a lot of efforts in his work, & I do not wish to rubbish it, as we say in French "la critique est aisee, mais l'art est difficile" criticism is easy but craftsmanship takes real effort...
I am as I said in an earlier post a native Arabic speaker & even though I seldom use Arabic now but to read Qur'an, my Arabic is one of the closest to Quranic Arabic (Sahraoui Arabic from the south of Algeria, I was born in Biskra) as I am from an area where Arabic tribes some led by Sidi M'hamed Al Moussa & was reared by a nanny who speaks it.
So when I read Qur'an against translations I have a "sixth" sense that tells me if the translation makes sense or not, of course there are words I do not know, but even Google translate translates waverer as undecided in English & undecis in French, not hypocrite.
Munafiq is destined to Hell in very harsh terms in Qur'an, translating it as waverer is to me an injustice on people who are undecided & who could be seduced back into Submission to Allah (in Qur'an mu'alafati qulubuhum).
I need to re-listen to the Moses section of The God Protocol, but overall he got right that aspect to Allah's pattern towards communities He raises Messengers in.
More later - I am starting this thread as an OpEd - not always against, bar some salient issues that are controversial even here, like Flat Earth & Salat as being a physical ritual vs. an abstract concept Sam Gerrans describes I believe erroneously as duty.