Seyyed Jalāl Āl-e-Ahmad (Persian: 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 religious in an autobiographical sketch written 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. Jalal and Simin were infertile, a topic that was reflected in some of Jalal's works.

He died in Asalem, a rural region in the north of Iran, inside a cottage which was built almost entirely by himself. He was buried in the Firouzabadi Mosque in Ray, Iran. According to rumors he was poisoned by SAVAK, but this was vehemently contradicted by his wife, who confirmed the official cause of death, pulmonary embolism due to alcohol and nicotine abuse.

In 2010, the Tehran Cultural Heritage, Tourism, and Handicrafts Department bought the house in which both Jalal Al-e Ahmad and his brother Shams were born and lived.

We have been unable to preserve our own historicocultural character in the face of the machine and its fateful onslaught. Rather, we have been routed. We have been unable to take a considered stand in the face of this contemporary monster. So long as we do not comprehend the real essence, basis, and philosophy of Western civilization, only aping the West outwardly and formally (by consuming its machines), we shall be like the ass going about in a lion's skin. We know what became of him. Although the one who created the machine now cries out that it is stifling him, we not only fail to repudiate our assuming the garb of machine tenders, we pride ourselves on it. For two hundred years we have resembled the crow mimicking the partridge (always supposing that the West is a partridge and we are a crow). So long as we remain consumers, so long as we have not built the machine, we remain occidentotic. Our dilemma is that once we have built the machine, we will have become mechanotic, just like the West, crying out at the way technology and the machine have stampeded out of control.

Al-e-Ahmad is perhaps most famous for using the term gharbzadegi, originally coined by Ahmad Fardid and variously translated in English as weststruckness, westoxification and occidentosis - in a book by the same name Occidentosis: A Plague from the West, self-published by Al-e Ahmad in Iran in 1962. In the book Al-e-Ahmad developed a "stinging critique of Western technology and by implication of Western 'civilization' itself". He argued that the decline of traditional Iranian industries such as carpet weaving was the beginning of Western "economic and existential victories over the East." His criticism of Western technology and mechanization was influenced, through Ahmad Fardid, by Heidegger, and he also considered Jean-Paul Sartre as another seminal philosophical influence. There was also Ernst Jünger, to whom Jalal ascribes a major part in the genealogy of his famous book, and he goes on to say "Junger and I were both exploring more or less the same subject, but from two viewpoints. We were addressing the same question, but in two languages." Throughout the twelve chapters of the essay, Al-e Ahmad defines gharbzadegi as a contagious disease, lists its initial symptoms and details its etiology, diagnoses local patients, offers a prognosis for patients in other localities, and consults with other specialists to suggest a rather hazy antidote.

His message was embraced by the Ayatollah Khomeini, who wrote in 1971 that