Is Dr. Farhad Shafti A Scholar
Unfortunately, that’s not a type of question that you’ll find an answer to on this forum. You will have to do your own research and figure out who you trust enough as a scholar in order to consider their opinion as valid. If you share an opinion, however, along with it’s argument (or a reference thereof) we can help you understand that opinion and any potential issues that it might have.
I am sorry but my experience of Dr Farhad Shafti is very different I met him for the first time in 2010 in UK with dr shehzad saleem. Both of them spent a long weekend get-together with few of brothers working to spread the work of Farahi school in England He was Shia muslim and was working in middleast. Then he left Shia schools and studied with Ghamidi sahab and his students scholars and then part his ways. He has had many transformations in his ideas. In short, he has his own philosophical ideas and structures. He formulated “how” a religion should be in this age then he looked at Quran, seerah, history etc and took whatever fits his philosophical structure and comes up with his version of Islam. His believes in universality of religion and uses philosophical questions and then answers them by reformatting quranic injunctions. Please read his long article Universality of Quran (3rd edition) and you will see how he come forward with his ideas (not quranic) and then fits different ayahs and his interpretation of history to prove his point. You can verify all the ayahs and you will see that they are either differently translated , out of context or broken. His interpretation of history is also his own and, frankly, without any basis or outright wrong. His religious rulings are also based on his ideas of how religion of Islam “ought to be” than how it actually is.
If you want to understand Dr. Shafti’s differences with Ghamidi sahab, you can attend this lecture series: From Islam to islam