I am of a similar view to dan but closer in opinion to Muslimah. To me it was a punishment from Allah. Obviously i wouldnt go around saying this to the families as this is not the way of Islam, we still donate still help but to me it was a punishment. As has been mentoned the people walking nakes on beaches, sex locations, prostitution, Muslims officially told they don't have to pray the five times no more in the area. The list of things that point to a punishment are immense in my eyes.
In my opinion you have to look at it like this, Allah (Subhanahu wa ta'ala) controls everything. We as Muslims know this, so he directly knew what was going to happen, knew how many would die, how the world would respond, even the date one day after CHRISTmas...it just all adds together. Obviously because it's impossible not to look at it from a world perspective it seems unthinkable a God could allow this to happen. But this world is not the real one, it's the transitory period, the testing zone, these are all tests. Maybe our lesson from this is to show how important it is to give Charity, those survivors who were affecteds lesson is how much did they worship Allah (Subhanahu wa ta'ala) allow things to happen in their vicinity etc. And most importantly, <b>how much will they worship him now and learn from this. </b>The non belivers lesson is to look and see the signs of Allah (Subhanahu wa ta'ala) so you have no excuses when you are asked on the Last Day and so on, everyone can get a lesson from this, this could also be the wisdom behind it
I mean as i said in another post on this of course no one knows, each individual has their own veiw but the only one who knows for sure, is The Most High. But Qur'an verses and Hadith in my eyes point to the views i gave above. Not nice at all of course, but we only think this when we forget that this world is a very very short testing period for man. The "real" world, those who died will be in now as far as they know, which is the hereafter. Insha Allah.