An Alabama man born in Syria says a brain aneurysm suffered when he was a Muslim resulted in his starting on a path to accepting Christ as Lord.

Karim Shamsi-Basha grew up in Syria and were practicing Muslims. Shamsi-Basha told the Christian Post he was “very serious” and prayed five times a day. He said he would go to mosque before sunrise and fasted during Ramadan.

He moved to the U.S. when he was 18 to attend the University of Tennessee and stayed because he was not a fan of President Bashar al-Assad’s government. In 1992 he fell into a month-long coma after a brain aneurysm.

After he woke, a doctor told him that he needed to find out why he survived the aneurysm. He accepted Christ in 1996 but then faced a decade of struggles from divorce to homelessness before he fully realized his position in Christ.

Shamsi-Basha tells his life’s story in a book called “Paul and Me”. He says most of his family are still Muslim and he never told his father, who died in 2005, that he had become a Christian.

He says he’s been struggling to get his sister out of Syria since the beginning of the Syrian Civil War but U.S. officials have denied her visa.