Jalal Al-e-Ahmad

Jalal Al-e-Ahmad (1923–1969) was an Iranian writer, translator, essayist, and social critic. He was born in Tehran into a religious family, received religious instruction for a time, and then gravitated toward literature and political and cultural activism. Al-e-Ahmad graduated from Tehran’s Higher Education Institute in Persian literature in 1947 and worked as a teacher for many years. In 1950 he married Simin Daneshvar, the prominent Iranian fiction writer.

Al-e-Ahmad is one of the most influential figures in contemporary Persian prose. His work falls into three main areas: social fiction, critical essays, and travel writing/ethnography. His prose is sharp, concise, colloquial, and tense, and it typically addresses issues of intellectual life, education, tradition, religion, colonialism, the village, oil, Gharbzadegi (Weststruckness), and Iran’s relationship with modernity. The concept of “Gharbzadegi” was first formulated by Ahmad Fardid, but Al-e-Ahmad’s book Gharbzadegi turned it into one of the central terms of Iranian intellectual discourse in the 1960s.