When we launched the Simurg’un Sedası website in 2017, we published the message below under the heading “A Message From the General Coordinator.” It remained there until KAF was established. Recently, I noticed that it had been shared alongside an interview we gave, which brought it back to mind. I am sharing it below because I think it conveys well how and why Simurg’un Sedası was founded:
A Message From the General Coordinator
Behind Simurg’un Sedası is the story of a few young people who had discovered their own culture and history relatively late and had grown weary of the attitudes and incompetence of people merely “going through the motions,” to use Doğan Cüceloğlu’s phrase. In 2012, they asked, “How can we make ourselves competent despite all the setbacks, our ignorance, and our lack of resources?” Their answer was a collective effort by people free of personal ambition, sincerely committed to academic ethics and values, and unwilling merely to pretend to work. Each week, one person would prepare a subject they knew well, wanted to specialize in, or found interesting. They would gather in a café and share what they knew in a seminar open to anyone who wanted to attend. Those seminars have continued as a tradition ever since.
The team began its first activities in 2013. As it became known in the city where it worked, it gained opportunities to broaden its activities. Team members produced a monthly bulletin and television programs and edited a weekly arts and culture page in a local newspaper, among many other tasks, entirely as volunteers.
As the Simurg’un Sedası team, our most fundamental principle is to put scholarship above everything else. For us, academic thinking is an indispensable instrument in the search for truth, capable of bringing together every kind of difference. In this spirit, we identified with the image of “birds trying to reach Simurg despite every hardship” and set out toward our ideal—toward Simurg. We drew a parallel between the efforts of dozens of birds of different kinds and qualities to fly toward Simurg on Mount Qaf and the aim of young people with different fields of study, characters, skills, and worldviews to serve Turkish scholarship. We undertook this work voluntarily, expecting no personal gain.
Our work has two fundamental purposes. The first is to become aware of one another, get to know friends working with their own resources to produce knowledge in different corners of the world, and build our community. The second is to bring our existing work under one roof and provide the scholarly benefit that first motivated us, both to our readers and to one another. Our aim is not to change the world but to broaden one another’s worlds and those of our readers. For this reason, the website will emphasize work that appeals to all kinds of readers rather than dense, elaborate academic texts.
Simurg’un Sedası has no fixed team. Since 2012, dozens of people have worked through the night on everything from its logo and website to poster designs and weekly presentations. In our eyes, anyone sincerely committed to academic ethics and values who dedicates themselves to their work without seeking personal gain is part of our team.
I would like to close with these lines by Nazım Hikmet:
“From China to Spain, from the Cape of Good Hope to Alaska,
At every nautical mile, every kilometer, I have friends and enemies.
Friends with whom I have never exchanged so much as a greeting,
Yet we could die for the same bread, the same freedom, the same longing.
And enemies who thirst for my blood,
As I thirst for theirs.
My strength
Is that I am not alone in this great world.”
Oral TOĞA
GENERAL COORDINATOR