Intimate Fractures: The Aftermath of a Rape

In 1963, Mustafa, a male Palestinian Duke University foreign student, attended a political rally in Durham, North Carolina. While walking to the event,three men viciously attacked him and then raped him. In the days after the attack, the trauma causes him to withdraw from his girlfriend and seek a fresh start. He began the long cross-country walk to Stanford University, where previously he had been accepted.
During his travel, Mustafa faced many joys and challenges as he met with injury, hospitality and kindness, friendship, felonies, racism, and, of course, love. He met farmers, international criminals, and, incredibly, a Palestinian-American Polygamist family. Through his adventures and misadventures, he experienced the full range of human emotion, but learned that the biggest challenge was within himself. Could he reconcile his bodily desires with his wounded self-image and become a true partner to the woman he loved?

Wagih Abu-Rish is a Palestinian-American author and activist. He spent much of his career as a businessman, specializing in acquisitions. During a long and varied professional career, he was a foreign journalist in Beirut, Lebanon, and an ad executive on Madison Avenue in New York.He has been active in promoting progressive causes such as democratic practices and equal rights. Among those causes, he feels strongly about the need for the liberation of women in the Middle East, which he considers to be the most overlooked and abridged human right of all.It is his hope that this book highlights the themes he believes in. The most salient of such themes is the fact that most adherents are ignorant of the essence of their own religions. This applies equally to the adherents of Islam and to all other religions.His second and mostly implied theme is the difficulty people have in humanizing others, whether that means another gender, ethnicity, or nationality. Such humanization is the starting point for resolving difficulties and conflicts between competing individuals, parties, and countries.Mr. Abu-Rish earned bachelor's and master's degrees in journalism from the University of Houston and the University of Oregon. This is his first novel.