Who Is Abdul Alhazred?

Abdul Alhazred, styled the Mad Arab, was a poet of Sana'a, in Yemen, and the writer of the book that reached the West as the Necronomicon. This office has no dossier for him, because he is not a figure in any account on file: he is the first name in the Necronomicon's own ledger of readers, and he is entered there as the writer of the book, circa 730 AD.

What is recorded of him

The Archive's note follows the received history. He wandered for years in the ruins of Babylon, beneath the city of Memphis, and in the southern deserts of Arabia, where he is said to have spent time in the nameless city. He then settled in Damascus, where he compiled the book under its Arabic title, the Al Azif, a word for the night-sound of insects that the people of the region held to be the voices of demons.

How he died

In 738 AD, in the marketplace of Damascus, in daylight and before a crowd, he was seized and devoured by something nobody present could see. The account comes from the twelfth-century biographer Ebn Khallikan, and the Archive's ledger records it without comment. The Archive's own count of the book's readers includes him among those who died of it.

Where his name turns up

He is cited, not met. His name is quoted at the head of the account of The Hound and in the accounts of The Nameless City and The Festival, where a witness consults his book or recalls a line of his, and in The Dunwich Horror and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, where those who owned the Latin text drew on it. The couplet about the eternal sleeper and the strange aeons that is attributed to him in The Nameless City is the best known of the passages.

The original Arabic has been lost since at least the time of Olaus Wormius, and the rumour of a surviving manuscript turns up every few decades and has never been borne out.