The story of the forgotten Arab victims of Titanic, told 100 years later

[Al Bhatti]

09 April 2012

The story of the forgotten Arab victims of the Titanic, told 100 years later

One hundred years have passed since the sinking of the Titanic, considered the worst disaster the seas have ever witnessed in the twentieth century. In the middle of the extensive coverage this shocking event has received, hardly anything has been mentioned about the Arab passengers that perished on the ship.

In addition to the list of victims which reveals all the Arabs who died in the tragedy were Lebanese except one Egyptian, the proof of Arab presence on the ship was evident in the 1997 blockbuster movie directed by James Cameron.

In the film “Titanic,” an Arabic speaking mother is heard urging her daughter to hurry when she ship starts to sink. The Lebanese accent with which she says “Come! Come!” in Arabic shows her roots.

Her husband replies, also with a Lebanese accent, “Wait! Let me see what we can do,” while panicking in one of the third class corridors. Behind the Lebanese family appears the film’s protagonist Leonardo Di Caprio, also an inmate of the third class, running with Kate Winslet in tow.

The Lebanese husband is seen flipping through the pages of a book that contains a layout of the ship in order to look for a way out. Other than this scene, which lasted for only six seconds, nothing was heard of Arabs who died in this tragedy even though the world keeps remembering the victims on every anniversary.

This clip from the movie is shown on Al Arabiya followed by real footage from the only video recorded inside the ship since it sailed on its way to New York. The video was discovered 27 years ago.
Titanic tragedy felt in Lebanon

The village of Kafr Mishki in the Rashaya District southeast of the Lebanese capital Beirut suffered the most in the Titanic tragedy. The village, whose population does not exceed 500, lost 13 of its residents.

“The church of Kafr Mishki will hold Sunday a Mass for the victims and the congregation will observe a minute of silence to mourn their death,” village mayor Khalil al-Sikli told Al Arabiya in a phone interview.

Sikli added that more than 11,000 natives of Kafr Mishki have immigrated to several parts of the world and are currently scattered over five continents.

“More than 6,000 from Kafr Mishki are in Ottawa, Canada alone.”

The village of Hardine in the Batroun District in northern Lebanon comes second as far as lives lost in Titanic are concerned.

“Hardine lost 11 of its residents in the Titanic [disaster],” the village mayor Bakhous Sarkis Assaf told Al Arabiya.

“When the ship started sinking in the first hours of dawn, those 11 passengers gathered in one corner and started reciting verses one of them improvised in the style of Lebanese vernacular poetry.”

According to Assaf, who says the story has been narrated down generations, the verses Hardine residents recited right before their death were: “O Hardine, weep and lament the death of 11 of your youths who did not exceed 25 years old. Five of them are single and the others are married. None of them is old. They’re all 25.”

Like Kafr Mishki, Hardine will hold a Mass in its church to remember its victims in Titanic, Assaf added.

“I just wish that the Lebanese government would also remember those forgotten victims especially at the 100th anniversary of the tragedy.”

Assaf from Pennsylvania told the story of a 19-year-old boy called Daher Shadid Abi Shadid from the village of Abrine in northern Lebanon. Abi Shadid accidentally killed a girl from his village while experimenting with his gun.

“Fearing the retaliation of the girl’s family, Abi Shadid left the village not knowing where to go until his uncle, who lived in Pennsylvania, sent him some money and told him to travel to the U.S.,” Assaf told Al Arabiya.

Shadid first went to Marseille in France and from there boarded the Titanic which stopped at the UK to pick up more passengers before sailing to New York.

“Shadid escaped a fate in Lebanon only for his uncle to receive his corpse from the Titanic,” he said, again recounting a story as told throughout generations.

(This is the first of a three-part series of articles on Arabs who lost their lives on the Titanic.)

The story of the forgotten Arab victims of the Titanic, told 100 years later

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The Arabic version of the news has more details, and the video clip as mentioned above:

لبنانيون تم قتلهم في "تايتنك" رمياً بالرصاص

 

[Al Bhatti]

Tuesday, 10 April 2012

Part II: The story of the forgotten Arab victims of the Titanic, told 100 years later

Even though the list of victims who died on the Titanic denotes who among them was Arab, it is difficult to find enough information on their Arab nationalities and what circumstances drove them to board the doomed ship. This even applies to Encyclopedia Titanic, the most comprehensive source on the 1912 tragedy.

One of the challenges facing anyone investigating the case of foreigners on the Titanic is the way Arab names have been written as they do not necessarily correspond to the original names in Arabic. For example, Yusuf would become Joseph and Boutros would become Peter and so on.

One of the victims came from a family called Badr in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli. The name was however spelled as “Badt” in the foreign media and had his first name not been Mohammed, no one would have guessed he was Arab.

The same happened with one of the survivors who came from the village of Chanay in the Aley District of western Lebanon. Nassef Qassim Abi al-Muna was written as “Albimona.” According to Muna’s granddaughter, the Beirut-based journalist Nada Fayyad, her grandfather died in Lebanon in 1975.

“He left behind an entire tribe that amounts to 200 children and grandchildren,” she told Al Arabiya. “Thank God he survived. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be here talking to you.”

Fayyad added that her grandfather was married when he boarded the Titanic to a Lebanese woman who he divorced when he returned from the United States.

“In Lebanon, he married another woman and had six girls with her. The youngest is my mother who currently lives in the United States.”

A large number of the Titanic’s Arab passengers were laborers and farmers, as was made clear in the “travel contract” they signed with the company that owned the ship.

Suleiman Attallah, who drowned on the Titanic at the age of 30, was an exception. Attallah, who immigrated to Canada, was from Kafr Mishki, the village in Rashaya District that lost 13 of its residents on the Titanic.

Lebanese journalist and writer Samir Attallah could not confirm his relation with the deceased.

“I do not recall one of my relatives being on the Titanic and dying on it,” he told Al Arabiya.

Arab passengers on the Titanic rank fifth after the British (327), the Americans (306), the Irish (120), and the Swedish (113) as the largest group aboard the ship. Arabs were made up of one Egyptian and approximately 81 Lebanese, 20 women and 46 men. The youngest of Arab passengers was 16 and the oldest 45 and they had with them children whose ages ranged from three months to 15 years. Only 30 of them survived.

The only proof that those passengers were Lebanese is not their travel document since they carried Ottoman identification that indicated them as residents of Greater Syria, which includes present-day Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Jordan. It was rather the fact that they came from villages that still have the same names in Lebanon.

The tiresome mission of tracing the Lebanese victims of the Titanic was first embarked upon by the Lebanese newspaper al-Anwar. In 1998, the newspaper published a report about correspondence between Lebanese expatriates in the United States and their families in Lebanon. This correspondence contained several names of Lebanese passengers on the Titanic and information about them.

A month later, another report was prepared by Palestinian-Lebanese journalist Ray Hanania which included a list of 79 names that did not include the Egyptian and the other Lebanese. He also published the names in their English form so the original Arabic remained unclear.

“I got the idea of digging up information about Arab passengers on the Titanic when I saw the movie and heard one of the passengers in it speak Arabic,” he told Al Arabiya.

Of the 899 crew members of the Titanic, there was one who was Lebanese, Mansour Meshaalani.

Meshaalani, also a British citizen, was born in 1860 in Lebanon and was in charge of the printing department on the ship on which food menus and name tags were printed.

He was also in charge of a daily newsletter that acquainted passengers with the activities that took place on the ship. Meshaalani did not survive the tragedy.

In 2010, Syrian-American writer Laila Salloum Elias released a book called “The Dream and then the Nightmare: Syrians who Boarded the Titanic.”

Elias sourced most of her information from Arabic language newspapers issued in New York on the year of the tragedy like al-Hoda and Meraat al-Gharb.

“There I found the original Arabic names of the Lebanese passengers who were aboard the Titanic,” she told Al Arabiya.

Elias noted that the word “Syrians” in her subtitle refers to citizens of Greater Syria and not present-day Syria.

Last year, Atlas publishing house in Beirut and Damascus released an Arabic translation of the book.

Part II: The story of the forgotten Arab victims of the Titanic, told 100 years later