The Only Egyptian on the Titanic Survived on Lifeboat No. 3

Titanic history remembers its famous names, but the only Egyptian aboard the ship when it sank in 1912 had been reduced to a line in the passenger record. It took journalist Yasmeen Saad three years, a chance discovery, and a stranger's comment online to confirm not just that he existed, but who he was and what happened the night the ship went down.

In 2012, Saad had stumbled across a documentary about Lebanese passengers on the Titanic. Having not known there were Arabs on the ship, she dived into a research rabbit hole, coming across Hammad Hassab. "I'm Egyptian. I need to find him," she remembers thinking.

Searches under Hassab's name turned up nothing. Saad hit a wall, “Over 100 years had passed and ordinary people from that period had not been properly archived.”

She started posting her progress online and asking anyone with a potential connection to reach out. For two months, Saad checked her messages every day. "During my research, I often found myself talking to him. I would say, 'Please let me find you.'"

Then a woman named Horeya left a comment: a friend of hers believed her father-in-law was connected to Hassab. Saad went to meet them, laid her research against the family's own timeline, and watched it match with the documents and photographs the family still had.

The story Saad and Hassab's surviving family pieced together begins with Hassab working as a tour guide around the Pyramids, fluent in English, Arabic, French, and German. One of the tourists he guided was Henry Sleeper Harper, an American publisher living in Egypt at the time, and his wife, Mira Harper. When the Harpers were due to sail back to New York, Henry gave Hassab a first-class ticket as a gift making him the only Egyptian on the Titanic, and the only Arab travelling first class.

Hassab was standing alone on the deck the night of the ship wreck when he noticed shards of ice spread across the deck. Having overheard a crew member discussing that the ship had struck an iceberg, he ran to wake Henry and Mira.

He cut the rope holding Lifeboat No. 3, got the Harper’s aboard, and jumped in after them. "His family had always told me that Hammad cut the rope before the boat had reached full capacity," she says, "and when I compared that story with the historical photographs, it matched."

Hassab survived and was questioned in the official Titanic inquiry. That was the last solid trace of him for three years. “There is a complete gap, it’s like a black hole.”

Saad has her own theory. "I believe it's possible he experienced memory loss after surviving the disaster, and only returned to Egypt once he had recovered."

When Hassab did return, he returned to working as a tour guide, meeting tourists and sharing Egyptian culture. However, for the following ten years after the diameter and its associated trauma, he never travelled.

For years, when he did mention the Titanic at all, it came out sounding almost pleasant, told like a bedtime story. "They had heard that their grandfather had been on the Titanic, but they assumed it was simply a family legend," Saad says.

Though the three years following the shipwreck remain a mystery, Saad submitted her research to Encyclopedia Titanica in 2018, cementing Hassab as a permanent part of Titanic history, no longer family legend but a name in the record over a century later.