PORT TOWNSEND, Wash. -- Few people in the world were more plugged into the firestorm over cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad that appeared in a Danish newspaper in 2005 than Ahmed Akkari.

Akkari condemned the images as blasphemy and led demonstrations in Denmark and the Middle East in response. His words appeared hundreds of times in the Danish press. The newspaper's editors and cartoonists faced years of death threats. Danish embassies were torched and scores were killed during protests in Denmark, Syria, Afghanistan Lebanon and Iran.

Then Akkari, a native of Lebanon raised in Denmark, moved to Greenland, far from the furor he helped fan. And he began to change his mind.

This summer, Akkari returned to Denmark on a sort of apology tour. Here's where an international story gets very local: Akkari credited an obscure American professor 2,900 miles away on Washington's Olympic Peninsula with influencing his transformation from radical Islamist to apologetic agnostic.

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The man who helped change Akkari's mind is 47 and driving a red pickup, the fuel gauge flatlined at empty. He is heading into Port Townsend, where he teaches philosophy and English literature at a satellite campus of Peninsula College.

Wes Cecil is a published

,

,

and academic but no household name, not even in this Victorian seaport community of 9,000 along the Salish Sea. But the adjunct professor's reputation is fabled among the 600 students who take college classes in the Old Schoolhouse building at

. And he has a rapt and growing following in the world of online learning.

"I didn't know you could read a book the way he does," said 18-year-old Kevin Webber. Webber admits taking more lit and philosophy classes than required as a junior biology major at Peninsula. The man he calls Cecil is the reason.

"It's hard to get your fix of Cecil," he says. "Really, he's as much a history teacher as an English teacher. He presents everything in such a comprehensive manner."

Cecil, who earned a bachelor's degree in English from California State University Fresno and his interdisciplinary master's and Ph.D. from Indiana University, gets equally glowing reviews in the comment sections of lectures he posts on YouTube.

There are 29 selections in all, audio recorded during free monthly community lectures Cecil gives at Fort Worden. Topics range from modern and ancient thinkers – the

and

– to literature, culture, and the humane arts of

,

and

.

Cecil has an ease with language: he speaks French, translates works in Latin and German, and can read Spanish, Italian and Swedish. The lectures have a fluency to them, too.

The professor's videos have racked up 100,000 views around the world. One fan,

, who also likes videos on molecular genetics, Pavarotti and classes filmed at Harvard, Yale and Stanford, offered this comment about Cecil's interpretation of French language and literature: "Listening to your lectures is like bathing in the spring breeze." Another viewer,

, dubbed Cecil's discourse on Simone de Beauvoir: "Entertaining and informative, that's how a lecture should be!"

Using geography software, Cecil has tracked viewers in Southeast Asia, South America, Africa and Greenland. Someone in Greenland listened to Cecil's lectures on Simone Weil, a radical philosopher who sacrificed herself for a monastic ideal, Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, and talks on Arabic and Persian literature and civilization.

In an interview last month with

, an Internet news outlet, Akkari now 35 and as curious as a college student, recommended Cecil's disquisitions.

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Akkari seemed to credit the icy isolation of Greenland with giving him time to reconsider his radical beliefs.

At the height of the protests over the cartoons – which included the illustration by a Danish artist, Kurt Westergaard, of the Prophet with a bomb tucked in his turban – Akkari traveled with other imams to the Middle East to spread the anger against Denmark. Riots killed more than a hundred people, two Danish embassies were burned to the ground and protestors boycotted Danish exports.

In an

newspaper in August, he told a reporter that it was after moving to the northernmost continent in the late 2000s that his mind began to change.

"I had plenty of time to read and write. And think," Akkari said.

He embraced philosophy, starting with Danish existentialist philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard, he said.

"He told how he had stayed in Greenland and in this epic and barren environment had undergone an existential crisis," Radio host Mads Holger and cultural critic Kasper Stvring said in an English translation of a

.

Repentant, Akkari apologized to Westergaard, the editors and artists at Jyllands-Posten, one of Denmark's most widely read newspapers, and others he had condemned.

Cecil, who has had no contact with Akkari, called the man's conversion "a victory for the Enlightenment."

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That Akkari was isolated in Greenland when he underwent the transformation in his thoughts and beliefs confirms Cecil's philosophy that the French and German 17th and 18th Century ideals on reason, known as the Enlightenment, are best absorbed in still places.

"If you're in Greenland, man, you've got some time to kill," Cecil said over cups at a coffee shop near the Rose Theatre.

"If you're overwhelmed with stimulus, if you're in an environment that continually reinforces the same ideas, it's hard to break them, in fact, nearly impossible," Cecil said. "Where you actually have time and space to reflect and think, then potentially, you can explore.

Cecil embodies his own theory: he lives on a serene spread set in a clearing on five wooded acres in Jefferson County. A brood of hens chatters in a chicken run along the edge of a well-loved garden. The deep freezer is packed with a season of fruits and vegetables.

His wife Denise Prager, a master gardener, paints in a ground floor studio. Upstairs in the den, a basket holds a blanket, knitted by his mother-in-law, big enough to cover a truck bed.

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On public lecture nights, nearly 100 people crowd into the Old Schoolhouse building at Fort Worden.

On a clement late September evening, students spilled out of their chairs onto the floor to listen to Cecil

. The class size surprised even the teacher.

"I was sure people were going to ditch," he said.

During a 54-minute lecture, Cecil spoke about Russia's highly centralized but often disconnected governments. He's a physical teacher: his hands rarely still as he describes how Russia's inhospitable size played a role in the country's identity.

Cecil started giving the free classes several years ago as a way to connect residents of Port Townsend to

, a small community college based an hour west in Port Angeles.

College students make up a quarter of the audience, which usually include a large number of retirees as well.

Like Akkari, they credit the professor with broadening their minds.

"He's always entertaining," said Steve Obrebski, 75, a retiree from Port Angeles who has attended Cecil's monthly lectures for three years.

"He does make you think."

Apparently, he was able to have that impact on Akkari from thousand of miles away.

"You can allow yourself to question, which is you know, unsettling, unnerving, perhaps dangerous, chaotic," Cecil said. "Then you can say 'oh, this thing that I thought isn't quite right. Maybe it's more nuanced, more subtle.' And then as you begin that questing process, if you allow yourself to pursue that, all kinds of ideas can come to you."

– Kimberly A.C. Wilson