Ali Jafarian teaches music to young women in Shiraz — his blindness giving him access he couldn’t have otherwise. Together they practice the slow, sad rhythms and searing melodies of Iranian music.

From the time of Omar Khayyam, Iran’s poets and dreamers have contended that this nation’s plight couldn’t be conveyed through books or numbers issued by state organs, but must emerge through the slow, sad rhythms and searing melodies of its music, the multi-layered textures of its verse and the tiny curves of its miniature paintings, which depict scenes of longing, lost possibilities and betrayal.