Incendiary editorial cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed as a terrorist have incited widespread and violent reactions across the Middle East.
Though the cartoons were published on Sept. 30 of last year, the violent response to the cartoons did not begin until January of this year - a delay that, according to Comparative Religion Professor Mohamed Mahmoud, is due to the nature of the forces behind the violence.
Mahmoud attributes the riots and killings to "the actions of highly organized groups in Muslim countries and the West," as well as an anti-Western atmosphere in the Middle East that has been exacerbated by the Iraq war.
According to Mahmoud, the fact that the violence was perpetrated by extremist Muslim organizations rather than "ordinary" Muslim individuals explains why the widespread reaction came so long after the initial publication of the cartoons.
"[T]he response is not spontaneous, it is orchestrated" by various Muslim extremist groups, he said.
"Ordinary Muslims would definitely have felt offended," Mahmoud added. "[But] the violent response is a function of the culture of Islamist activism."
"The cartoons, I believe, were meant to be provocative, and they were really in bad taste," Mahmoud said of the images, which were printed by Danish publication Jyllands-Posten.
The reasons the cartoons were "in bad taste" are linked to the traditional Islamic guideline that the Prophet Mohammed should not be represented with images.
Traditionally, Arabic Professor Mohammed Alwan said, orthodox Islam has adhered to the idea that "depiction of personalities would detract from the unity of God."
"There is nothing clear," Mahmoud said. "There have been drawings of the prophet commissioned by Muslim rulers," but works like these have largely stayed away from public consumption.
When it comes to depictions of the Prophet and his Companions, Mahmoud said, "attitudes have been on the whole quite conservative."
Due to the invention of modern photography and the wide acceptance of figural forms of art like sculpture, attitudes towards the portrayal of Muslim religious figures have become more elastic.
But Imam Noureddine Hawat, Muslim Chaplain at Tufts, said the majority of Muslims find pictures of the Prophet to be inappropriate, and feel especially repulsed by those depictions perceived as insulting.
Most Muslims at Tufts, he said, are "almost united in the feeling they are disgusted in what they saw."
Shirwac Mohamed, a Muslim sophomore, called the cartoons distasteful. He said that if the newspaper wanted to call attention to problems in the Middle East, it should have satirized one of those issues specifically, rather than targeting Islam as a whole.
"What does [the offending cartoon] have to do with free speech? [The paper's] point is not to show free speech; it's to hurt people or push their buttons," Mohamed said.
Hawat agreed that free speech has its limits. "People are not allowed to scream 'bomb' on an airplane," he said as an example of his belief that if someone's expression starts hurting other people it is no longer protected by freedom of speech.
But he made it clear that he in no way supports the violent reactions to the cartoons.
"Every time someone gets upset, they have to burn the American flag... that's the problem here; it's getting out of control," he said.
Alwan expressed a similar opinion. "Personally, I am for the freedom of expression... including caricatures of the prophet," Alwan said. "At the same time, I understand why Muslims would find that objectionable, and to live in this world we should take the Muslims' feelings into consideration."
Flemming Rose, the Jyllands-Posten editor who made the decision to run the cartoons, defended her actions in an opinion piece run by the Washington Post this weekend, citing a need to challenge fundamentalist Islam rather than cave in to its proscriptions.
"I commissioned the cartoons in response to several incidents of self-censorship in Europe... and I still believe that this is a topic that we Europeans must confront, challenging moderate Muslims to speak out," Rose wrote.
"If a believer demands that I, as a nonbeliever, observe his taboos in the public domain, he is not asking for my respect, but for my submission. And that is incompatible with a secular democracy," she wrote.
Alwan agrees that this perspective has been drowned out by the violence. "That's what happens when you put the wrong foot forward," he said in reference to the cartoons, which he said failed to adequately take the Muslim reaction into account.
Mahmoud pointed out that there are limits to many Muslims' anti-Western hostility.
"I don't think anti-Westernism is a deep thing... It has to do with what the west is doing right now," Mahmoud said. "The re-colonization of Iraq and Afghanistan has poisoned the whole atmosphere."
The Islamist groups that contributed to the violent reactions are "ultimately defined by what they are against," Mahmoud said. He believes that Islam will eventually shift away from radicalism and become more accepting, just like Christianity during its evolution.
Some Tufts students take a more radical approach to comparing the West with Islam.
"I don't think there's any cartoon you could draw, no matter how offensive... that would incite western Europeans or Americans to respond in that way," said Benjamin Kultgen, a sophomore studying comparative religion.
Kultgen cited an incident where American soldiers giving candy to Muslim schoolchildren became the target of a suicide bomber. "Why are people so complacent about Muslims blowing up Muslim schoolchildren [when they react so violently to a cartoon]?" he asked.
According to Rose's opinion piece, at least one of her goals in publishing the spread has already been accomplished: The controversy has inspired a network of moderate Muslims in Denmark to make it clear that their religion is compatible with modern secular democracy.
"The Muslim face of Denmark has changed," she wrote, "and it is becoming clear that this is not a debate between 'them' and 'us,' but between those committed to democracy in Denmark and those who are not."
Mahmoud said that Middle Eastern Muslims are perfectly capable of making the distinction between a Danish embassy and the actions of individual cartoonists, but that the extremist groups "don't want people to make that distinction."
