Abdul Alhazred

Origin and etymology

Reinforcing the book's fictionalization, the name of the book's supposed author, Abdul Alhazred, is not even a grammatically correct Arabic name. What is transliterated as "Abdul" in English is actually a noun in the nominative form ʿabdu (عَبْدُ, "servant") and the definite article al- (الـ) and amounts to "servant of the" with the article actually being part of the second noun in the construct, which in this case is supposed to be "Alhazred" (traditional Arabic names do not follow the European first name-surname format). But "Alhazred", even if considered as a corruption of al-ḥaḍrāt (حَضْرَات, "the presences") though it seems unlikely, itself is a definite noun (i.e., a noun prefixed by the definite article) and thus "Abdul Alhazred" could not possibly be a real Arabic name. Lovecraft first used the name "Abdul Alhazred" as a pseudonym he gave himself as a five-year-old, and very likely mistook "Abdul" to be a first name while inventing "Alhazred" as an Arabic-sounding surname.