When is enough truly enough?

There’s an older fellow in one of my classes this semester, who has indirectly put me in a bit of a bind. I’m stuck considering when one should go from tolerating rudeness and derogatory remarks, to not tolerating it anymore and doing something about the problem. Let me explain:

The class is about world history up to 1600. As to be expected, we started out with a primer on prehistory, and then moved on to Mesopotamia, Egypt, China - the river valley civilizations. From the very start, the man in question has kept taking over the class. He has interrupted the professor and started talking loudly, usually about the Bible’s take on the history. Such-and-such passage says this about the Egyptians; such-and-such passage says that about Babylon. He’s gotten into arguments with the professor about the history, usually because her take on it (or the view presented in our text) did not mesh well with his Biblical view. He’s asked the professor a question about what she was teaching, and then would not allow her to answer; she’d get about 3 words out and he’d drown her out, “No, no, I know that, what I’m asking is…” Often, he has interrupted and just started spouting off something about the Bible, something that wasn’t at all related to what she was lecturing on.

All of this, he’s done practically every class session. Everytime he has done it, it’s clear that the professor is uncomfortable with the situation, as is everyone else in the class; you can feel the tension practically zipping around the room. Thus far no one has said anything; the professor has been able to steer things back onto course (often repeatedly in one session).

Last Tuesday, he hit his high mark (or perhaps it’d be better to call it his low mark). We were working on the chapter about the rise of Islam, and so we were obviously dealing with Mohammed. It was prime territory for the guy to do some Bible-beating, and he pounced on the chance. He started arguing with the professor about the generally kinship-based successions in the caliphates, saying that that went against Jesus’s word, because he had said that only God could select a ruler^[1]. He asked, if Muslims believe in the Christian God, why are they disrespecting Jesus in such a way? The professor patiently explained that, despite believing in the same God, the fact is, Mohammed said that Jesus had some things wrong, and that Mohammed’s way was the right way to do things. After all, Mohammed created Islamd; he didn’t follow Christianity. She was not “standing up” for Islam, simply stating the facts about the history of the religion. The guy’s response was: “Well, huh, Mohammed’ll have something coming to him, then, heh heh. He’ll see.”

Now, am I being overly sensitive about this, or is that remark just completely discriminatory? I’m not Muslim, but if I were, I’d find that pretty insulting. If the guy has his beliefs, that’s fine, but saying something like that in a room full of, more or less, strangers? Not cool. It’s this remark that has me pretty much ready to go to someone who can take action against the guy. I’m not even going to bother attempting to talk to him in private about it, because while I’m not omniscient, I think I have a pretty good idea how productive the conversation would be.

What do you folks think? He’s an irritation at the least, and his “my history via the Bible is better than all of this!” attitude is maddening, but being irritating and having some peculiar ideas about history doesn’t warrant reporting him to someone. Does his remark warrant it? I feel like it does, but like I said, maybe I’m not seeing the situation clearly; I admittedly can’t stand the guy. Then again, I’d say that holds for the majority of my classmates…

(By the way, some of you might be wondering, if this guy is so bad, why hasn’t the professor done something? Good question. Answer: this particular professor is extremely nice, and goes above and beyond her duty to keep the peace. I truly believe that if this guy pulled this stuff in some of my other classes, he would have been booted weeks ago, with or without the knock at Islam.)

1. I’ve no idea if that’s actually in the Bible or not; just writing what this fellow said. I’d say it’s fairly obvious that I wouldn’t trust this guy’s word much. [↩]