Mining the Arab cultural and intellectual past was part of the project of the Nahda during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet, the aspects of Arab cultural and literary history that were emphasized, omitted, or critiqued by various Nahdawi intellectuals demonstrates the spectrum of political agendas in their present. Furthermore, the present scholarly emphasis within the Nahda has been on the Eastern Mediterranean, excluding the eastern Arab lands of Iraq, and even during the Nahda, Iraqi intellectuals sensed a cultural preference toward the economic hubs of Cairo, Beirut, as well as the Ottoman imperial capital, Istanbul. This paper examines two engagements with time in the Iraqi Nahda, both made possible because of its connection to the discourse of the Eastern Mediterranean but also due to its physical distance from it and social composition. The first engagement is the Baghdadi M. Fahmi al-Mudarris (Müderris-zâde Mehmed Fehmi) and his translation of Arabic literary history into Ottoman Turkish during lectures given at Darü’l-funûn in Istanbul in 1913. Al-Mudarris was not only translating pre-modern Arabic poetry and prose, but also, since he was basing his discussion of these texts on other Nahdawi framings, like those of Jurji Zaydan, Sulayman al-Bustani, and Louis Cheikho, he was translating the Nahda discourse into Ottoman Turkish. In particular, I focus on his acceptance of the “Semitic Wave Theory,” and this historical linguistic theory about pre-Islamic Arabian migrations spreading the Arabic language takes on new meaning in the Ottoman Empire of the 1910s, especially when exposed to a new, non-Arab audience, in Ottoman Turkish. The second engagement is the perception of temporal stagnation as reflected in the neoclassical poetry of Ma‘ruf al-Rusafi and Jamil Sidqi al-Zahawi. While Ottoman bureaucrats sent to the Iraqi provinces complained about its backwardness and the lazy inhabitants, the Iraqi Nahdawis performed a more nuanced complaint of stasis. After having visited eastern Mediterranean cities, witnessing what Baghdad lacked, and recognizing the Ottoman administration was to blame for that, al-Rusafi and al-Zahawi composed verses that invoked periodizations of past golden ages and possible resurrections of greatness. Their political critique in the form of lamenting the present stagnation also underscores what it means to be out of time. Al-Mudarris, al-Rusafi, and al-Zahawi’s turn to translating a historical narrative and portraying political critiques as temporal stagnation reflect the broader Nahdawi interest in modern historicism, but also reveal the dis/location felt by Iraqis within the same discourse.