It started as a tame art-history lesson, but evolved into a heated discussion of Muslims' responses to the reprinting of the cartoon of Muhammad wearing a bomb-shaped turban. The nearly 300 people who showed up at Penn's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology Monday night heard three takes on the controversy.

Adnan Zulfiqar, a professor of Islam at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, said Muslims find it ironic, even hypocritical, that Western countries would vilify the violent reaction as they perpetuate brutality in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.

"A continent that perpetuated colonialism for 200 years has little claim to the superiority of their values," he said, quoting an unnamed European columnist.

While depicting the prophet negatively may seem trivial to Westerners, Zulfiqar stressed the importance of context. He asked how Americans feel when people make light of events they hold sacred, such as genocide, lynchings and cross-burnings.

Renata Holod, the museum's curator of Islamic art who showed slides of historical depictions of Muhammad, said, "It's one thing to make fun of some group. It's another thing to operate in a space that shows lack of respect or disdain."

From a media perspective, Signe Wilkinson, the Daily News' Pulitzer Prize winning political cartoonist, said her peers weigh the importance of their message when using loaded images. After the talk, she applauded the Inquirer's decision to reprint the caricature. Still, there are limits. For example, her editors censored an early stab at the cartoon which featured various religious icons reading from The Big Fat Book of Obnoxious Religious Cartoons. "I wanted a cartoon to say, 'I can draw whatever I want,'" she says. "It gets on the other side of it."

A few years ago, Wilkinson recalls speaking to a Muslim woman offended by a cartoon responding to a cleric who disagreed with the display of women in a beauty pageant. (Wilkinson had drawn three veiled figures with sashes the read "Miss Illiteracy," "Miss Can't Vote," and "Miss Waiting to be Stoned.")

She said to the caller: If you want to wear a veil, that's fine with me, but you wouldn't force another woman to wear a veil, would you?"

The woman replied, "If it was for her own good."

"And that," Wilkinson said, "is why I continue to do this."