Re: Abdul Alhazred: Let's retroconlang the Mad Arab!

Andreas Johansson wrote:

> I had something a bit different in mind, however. A recurring name in
> Lovecraft
> is that of Abdul Alhazred, the "Mad Arab" who wrote the infamous
> _Necronomicon_. The name, deriving from Lovecraft's youthful infatuation
> with
> the Arabian Nights, isn't a "real" Arabic name, but a made-up
> Arabic-sounding
> one. Now, my idea was, could someone familiar with Arabic suggest a
> plausible
> early-medieval Arabic name that might without too great distortion have
> been
> mutated into "Abdul Alhazred" in  European tradition?
>
I'm not overly familiar with Arabic naming, but suspect this is incorrectly
put together.... Abdul means 'slave of...' and is usually followed by a word
_without_ the definite article al- (the word is usually --always?-- one of
the attributes of Allah). The only ones I know for sure are rahman and rahim
resp. 'all-powerful' and 'all-merciful' (in the formulaic "bismillah
ar-rahman ar-rahim")-- whence the quite common names Abdul Rahman, Abdul
Rahim (so I've been told by Indonesian friends). They are sometimes written
as one word-- Abdurrahman etc. (An important ruler of Moslem Spain was
"Abderramán" à l'espagnole)
Some whose meanings I don't know would be Abdul Gani (Ghani?) and our
colleague Yahya Abdal Aziz.

Friends and I, in our innocence, once wasted several hours trying to find
Abdul Alhazred and/or Necronomicon in the catalogue of Harvard's Widener
Library....Lacking Google in those days, one had to assume that if Widener
didn't have it, it didn't exist.

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