This paper will examine Sa‘dawi’s 2013 novel, which won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2014, from the perspective of the dominant branch of theory addressing science fiction. Theorists beginning with Darko Suvin have explored how SF uses cognitive estrangement to reflect our own world in the distorting mirror of the world of a given text. Cognitive means here that the world of the text is scientifically plausible within its own framework, while estrangement is borrowed from Brecht’s work on theatre and denotes a defamiliarization of the everyday. SF is, for these theorists, less a form of popular entertainment or storytelling than a means of social criticism. Arabic SF, an emerging genre in popular literature whose roots as a literature of social criticism date back to the 1960s as self-conscious SF, engages in what in previous published work I have called double estrangement, in which a text not only estranges the society from which it comes in order to critique it, but also foregrounds the overall stagnation or decline in scientific and technological productivity in its society over the modern period. Sa‘dawi uses the Whatshisname, the term for the monster assembled from body parts left behind by sectarian bombings, and others’ reaction to him both to make a critique of political and social conditions in US-occupied Iraq, and to estrange the gap between the Iraq of the Islamic Golden Age, and the Iraq of today, where technology comes from without and from which rational people emigrate. The novel also provides a counterexample to three of the dominant theories among Arab critics of ASF: it uses layered and three-dimensional rather than “flattened” characters to portray the effects of rationalism and (imported) technology upon Iraqis, it does not “patch” its narrative in order to contain the threat to traditional society posed by science, and it frames traditional culture rather than technology as dehumanizing. More importantly, however, by using characters from marginalized social and ethnic groups, the novel draws a contrast between the newly-independent Iraqi state of 2013 and beyond and its glorious past: by depicting how each of these marginalized identities has to wrap itself in falsehood or flee the country, Frankenstein in Baghdad argues that the decline in scientific and technological production is a result of moving from an embracement of diversity to an intolerance thereof.