Amjad Dabi was studying civil engineering in Damascus, Syria, when he met Dr. Bradley Bolen, who teaches piano at Baylor University, in the summer of 2010. As part of American Voices, a nonprofit cultural and diplomacy organization founded in 1993, Dr. Bolen spent six weeks in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon teaching piano to people who were hungry for music education.
“You know how they say music is the universal language? Well, I saw that firsthand during my time there. Students came to our workshops from all over the country, often at great personal risk,” said Dr. Bolen, who remembers Dabi as a serious student who hoped to use a music degree to get into medical school, which is not as counterintuitive as it sounds. Studies have shown that music majors are the most likely group of college graduates to be admitted to medical school, possibly because mastering an instrument requires a certain amount of focus and discipline.
In 1990, Syria established the Higher Institute of Music in Damascus as a conservatory for both Western and Arabic music. Aside from studying music there, Dabi also attended the University of Damascus. When he met Dr. Bolen, he had a plan: to finish his civil engineering degree before pursuing a graduate degree in Western Europe or the United States.
“I was always fascinated by the idea of living in America,” said Dabi, who had been an exchange student in Charlotte, North Carolina, when he was 15 years old. Still, when Dr. Bolen suggested that he come to Baylor to continue his studies, he initially declined his offer. “I was so close to finishing my degree, and all of my friends and family were in Syria.”
Then in December, a wave of anti-government protests that became known as the Arab Spring took place in the Middle East and North Africa. When a car bomb exploded near his house and Dabi was injured, he decided that it was unsafe for him to remain in Syria.
Dr. Bolen sprang into action, securing living arrangements in an apartment in Thailand owned by Jim Ferguson, Executive Director of American Voices. For the next nine months, Amjad studied for the SAT, ultimately earning a full scholarship to Baylor where Seventh and James Baptist Church in Waco provided free housing.
“I was struck by how beautiful the campus was,” said Dabi, who was 23 when he enrolled as a freshman. What he loved about Baylor was that it not only had a great music department but that it also offered a rigorous curriculum in science. “Since I was on a full scholarship,” he said. “I was able to take some of those classes at no extra cost.”
Those classes paid off because after graduating with a bachelor’s degree in piano pedagogy in 2017, Dabi went on to earn a master’s degree in environmental science in 2020.
With civil war raging back home, Dabi found Baylor to be a safe place where he could focus on his education. “It was a difficult time for me because I’d left everyone I loved and everything I knew, but people here were so welcoming, which made the transition much easier.”
When retelling Dabi’s story during her remarks at commencement ceremonies in May, 2025, President Linda Livingstone said “Amjad had to work through a very painful transition, probably more difficult than most of us will have to face, but he persevered even through his grief.”
Dabi is convinced that having a social network of caring people he could talk to and spend time with helped him become more resilient.
“I recognize that mine is a hopeful story, and I’m proud of what I’ve achieved,” he said. “But I never imagined that this is how my life would turn out. I loved Syria, but there was so much uncertainty about what was going to happen that I had to leave.”
Sadly, he lost his father in 2022, but it was too risky for him to go home for his funeral. If there is a downside to Dabi’s happily-ever-after, it’s that he has not seen his family since he started his new life in the United States. “If I’ve learned anything from [my father’s] experience, it’s that it’s folly to plan too far ahead,” Dabi said.
In a 2016 interview sponsored by Baylor University’s Institute for Oral History, Dabi shared his story with Zachary Wingerd, Senior Lecturer in History at Baylor, and journalist Brad Hoff. Their book, Syria Crucified: Stories of Modern Martyrdom in an Ancient Christian Land, was published in 2021. Raised Roman Catholic in a country where Christians are vastly outnumbered, Dabi admitted that as a child attending a private Christian school, he lived in a kind of bubble. In high school, most of his classmates were Druze, an Abrahamic, monotheistic religion influenced by a range of traditions from Christianity to Gnosticism and a belief in reincarnation and the transmigration of the soul.
It was only during his last year in high school where a lot of his classmates were Muslim that he felt a keen sense of being a minority for the first time. While he didn’t experience any overt discrimination, he allowed that there were times when he felt a rift. Christians in Syria, especially those in cities like Damascus where they tend to be well-educated, he said, lean a bit to the left politically, while Muslims tend to be a bit more conservative.
When asked if he’d sensed a rift between Orthodox Christians and Catholics like himself, Dabi pointed out that because Christians in Syria were a minority, they tended to coalesce around that identity, which became part of the culture. “I feel like in varying ways it’s very similar to the Jewish identity and how it’s related to ethnic identity,” he told Wingerd. “You know, a lot of Jews are secular Jews, but they’re still Jews, and that’s part of their identity.”
Overall, Dabi said he believes that Christians had a good relationship with the state after Bashar al-Assad came to power. “We always had ambassadors coming from overseas from the Vatican,” he said. “I remember playing the organ at a Franciscan church in Damascus, the only church that had an organ.”
The impact of the civil war on the Christian community in Syria cannot be understated. In pre-war Syria, 1.5 million Christians accounted for 10% of the population, but that number began to fall precipitously after 2011. Estimates suggest that by 2022, only 300,000 Christians, roughly 2% of the population, were left. While Dabi’s parents remained in Syria, most of his aunts, uncles and cousins fled elsewhere.
Reflecting on the complex and protracted conflict in his homeland, Dabi understands how easy it is to lose faith in humanity when you see how badly human beings can behave toward one another. But art, he says, offers an escape from our distressing circumstances and a way to enter a world that’s bigger than we are.
“Art is like a light they tried to put out, but there’s something about the human spirit that longs for beauty,” Dabi said. “The arts are also a reminder of our humanity, a way for us to connect. Think about me sitting in Damascus playing a piece by Beethoven, a German man who lived centuries before I was born and who had a completely different life experience from me. Still, he had his own struggles, and there’s something universal about our situation that comes across in the music.”
Recently, Dabi earned a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in bioinformatics and computational biology, an interdisciplinary field that blends biology, computer science, mathematics, and statistics to solve biological problems. He’ll continue his studies in a post-doc program at the University of Oregon where he’ll study genomics, a branch of molecular biology concerned with the structure, function, evolution, and mapping of genomes. With enormous potential to predict disease, genomics is literally transforming healthcare as we know it.
“Amjad is one of the smartest people I’ve ever known,” says Dr. Bolen, “but he’s also extremely compassionate. He feels things very deeply as musicians often do.”
Now that’s a winning combination in a world that seems to be sorely lacking in empathy these days.
