Drawing on the work of Edward Said, and in particular the argument of his essay “Traveling Theory” that theories travel both geographically and temporally, I investigate the journey of Sartre’s engagement (commitment) in Iraq during the two eventful decades of the 1950s and the 1960s. During those formative decades, I argue, there were two working interpretations of Sartre’s engagement in the Iraqi literary scene: one which adhered to a Pan-Arab Nationalist framework, and another communist interpretation which presented the concept as being synonymous with social realism and, hence, establishing strong affinity with the Iraqi Communist Party—the strongest political party in the country at the time. I show that those two representations of the concept correlated closely with the unfolding events of modern Iraqi history. In other words, when the communist party was operating (either as a tolerated opposition party during the monarchy, 1921-1958, or as an active participant in the affairs of the state during General Qāsim’s rule, 1958-1963), it popularized Sartre’s engagement as a communist one, so to speak, often exaggerating Sartre’s affiliation with communism. On the other hand, when the Arab Nationalists took over ruling Iraq and brutally suppressed the Iraqi Communist Party, they propagated a pan-Arabist version of commitment. My paper studies ʿAlī al-Wardī’s Uṣṭūrat al-adab al-rafīʿ (The Myth of Refined Literature) as well as the proceedings of the fifth Congress of Arab Writers, held in Baghdad in February, 1965, to trace the mutation in the meaning of Sartre’s engagement in Iraq from a communist concept to a Pan-Arabist one.