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Concept
Jalal Al-e-Ahmad
Summary
Seyyed Jalāl Āl-e-Ahmad (جلال آلاحمد; December 2, 1923 September 9, 1969) was a prominent Iranian novelist, short-story writer, translator, philosopher, socio-political critic, sociologist, as well as an anthropologist who was "one of the earliest and most prominent of contemporary Iranian ethnographers". He popularized the term gharbzadegi – variously translated in English as "westernstruck", "westoxification", and "Occidentosis" – producing a holistic ideological critique of the West "which combined strong themes of Frantz Fanon and Marx".
Jalal was born in Tehran, into a religious family – his father was a cleric – "originally from the village of Aurazan in the Taliqan district bordering Mazandaran in northern Iran, and in due time Jalal was to travel there, exerting himself actively for the welfare of the villagers and devoting to them the first of his anthropological monographs". He was a cousin of Mahmoud Taleghani. After elementary school Al-e-Ahmad was sent to earn a living in the Tehran bazaar, but also attended Marvi Madreseh for a religious education, and without his father's permission, night classes at the Dar ul-Fonun. He went to Seminary of Najaf in 1944 but returned home very quickly. He became "acquainted with the speech and words of Ahmad Kasravi" and was unable to commit to the clerical career his father and brother had hoped he would take, describing it as "a snare in the shape of a cloak and an aba." He describes his family as a religious family in the autobiographical sketch that published after his death in 1967.
In 1946 he earned an M.A. in Persian literature from Tehran Teachers College and became a teacher, at the same time making a sharp break with his religious family that left him "completely on his own resources." He pursued academic studies further and enrolled in a doctoral program of Persian literature at Tehran University but quit before he had defended his dissertation in 1951. In 1950, he married Simin Daneshvar, a well-known Persian novelist.
Official source
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