Jalal Al-e-Ahmad

She was the first woman to write a novel in Iran that was published.

She was married to a famous Iranian intellectual who's sometimes called the ideologue of the revolution, Jalal Al-e-Ahmad.

But in spite of all of those interesting things about her, when it came time to write a story that had an enslaved person in it, that person is not the important person in the story.

So that kind of became a way both into thinking about this kind of body of larger media that I was looking at, and the way that even when it featured a Black person, that person was almost always used as a foil to a kind of white Iranian or white Persian, um, character and sensibility-

The problem with colonial mentality is that you assume that they are people who are superior so they have the right to run the world, they have the right to tell you what to do, how to live, they have the right to define a lifestyle which you can follow and things like that.

And, I mean, Jalal al-Ahmad, the famous Iranian author who wrote the book Qarb Zadegi or West Toxification, he had this in mind, of course.

Today in academic studies, you know, post-colonialist studies post-colonialist theory deals with these issues and so yes obviously we have in Iran in some parts of Iranian politics views and minds which are defined by this mindset by this outlook and even in those who perhaps you don't expect because they are they look like you know strong revolutionaries who they they might have some of this may have impacted their views and so they may have made choices as you mentioned that for someone looking from outside will I think a few years ago we had one of the European Union's diplomats come and visit Iran for a session in parliament.

I don't know what it was.