Mohammad Reza Shajarian died last Saturday (8 October 2020).

I acquired a cassette of him a few years ago and it was of course a revelation. "I’m Mohammad Reza Shajarian, a child of Iran," Mr. Shajarian said in a video clip from a 2015 documentary about him. "My voice is part of Iran’s ancient culture, to remind the people of the world that we have had a culture of love, peace and friendship.” (From The New York Times obit: www.nytimes.com/2020/10/08/world/middleeast/Shajarian-dies-Iran-singer.html?searchResultPosition=1.)

More info in Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammad-Reza_Shajarian

A video clip in vimeo (03:15) excerpted from the documentary mentioned above: vimeo.com/133485873

A song in YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=japANH1G-nY
(I advise anyone who wants to comment NOT to say that this sounds Arabic :)

When I bought the cassette (and a few others afterward), I also bought an old book by Ella Zonis: Classical Persian Music. Although this book was published in 1973, I can't resist quoting a paragraph from the Introduction:

"The spirit of Persia has nearly vanished from modern Iran. Although its monuments are abundant, from the celebrated ruins of Persepolis to the splendors of Esfahan, evidence of a continuation of the culture that produced these monuments—a living evidence of what is uniquely Persian—is rare amid the predominantly Western culture emanating from Tehran. In Iran today, especially in the tumult of the capital, it takes a special wrench of the mind to remember that this is one of the world's oldest civilizations, one that produced truly great art and literature and one that has contributed to the spiritual enrichment of mankind for well over fifty centuries."
Ella Zonis, Classical Persian Music: An Introduction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 1.