In the hope-filled and tumultuous post-Arab-Spring moment, blasphemy prosecutions emerged in Tunisia as a critical and contested mechanism by which the Tunisian judicial system placed concrete limits on the constitutionally guaranteed freedoms of expression and religion. Yet these cases have widely been framed as anomalies, by supporters and opponents alike. My project places these contemporary cases of blasphemy (or attacks against the sacred, al-nayl min al-muqaddas?t) in a longer genealogy of historical blasphemy trials going back to late Ottoman Tunisia. By examining six cases, which represent all known blasphemy cases in Tunisia since (at least) the 1850s, I attempt to unpack the following puzzles: 1) if, as secondary scholarship tells us, blasphemy itself has long been common but its prosecution rare, then why were these very particular blasphemous acts prosecuted? Furthermore, 2) across these blasphemy cases, actors repeatedly invoke vulnerable Muslim feelings and the danger of hurting them. While considering claims of emotional injury as veracious, I will also ask: how might this framing (of blasphemy as emotionally injurious) be useful for opponents and proponents of prosecution? My project begins first in Ottoman and then colonial Tunisia, where two historical "blasphemers" were sentenced to death: the first, a Tunisian Jewish cart-pusher (1857) who allegedly blasphemed in the wake of a traffic accident, and the second, a self-assured Tunisian Muslim student (1904) who ruffled his instructors' feathers. My project then moves to the next set of known blasphemy cases: four blasphemy cases occurring in the post-Arab-Spring moment (2011-2013). The defendants in two of these cases are older elites: one, a TV channel president, and the others, two artists living in the capital. The defendants in the two remaining contemporary cases are marginalized young men: in the first, two self-declared atheists, and in the second, a young gay man living near the Libyan border. All of these 2011-2013 cases resulted (at least initially) in guilty verdicts. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research, my paper will advance a number of initial findings: first, that these blasphemy cases (1857-2013), though seemingly about religion, had much to do with competing political visions of Tunisian society and of who was best equipped to safeguard and lead it. I will also suggest that these opposing political visions were obscured by the use of a language of hurt, reminiscent of Saba Mahmood's term, "moral injury" (2013), and by the prosecutors' invocation of public order.