KAOLACK, Senegal — It hurts too much to lie on his back, so the 7-year-old has spent the past month stretched out on his stomach. His two grandmothers sit on the hospital bed beside him, fanning the pink flesh left exposed by his teacher’s whip.

It’s progress that Momodou Biteye is in the hospital at all. It’s also encouraging that the Quranic teacher who did this to him is behind bars.

But what is most significant is that the boy’s father — a poor farmer who sold part of his harvest to pay for the bus fare to the hospital — filed the charges against the teacher himself. In doing so, this man with cracked lips and bloodshot eyes braved the wrath of his entire village, including his own father, who considers all teachers in Senegal’s Islamic schools to be holy.

In hundreds of these schools in the mostly Muslim West African country, children are made to beg in the streets and are beaten if they don’t bring back enough money. One 10-year-old was beaten to death with his hands tied behind his back and his mouth stuffed with rocks. Despite laws passed to protect children, the courts have convicted only a handful of Quranic teachers and quickly cave in the face of powerful clerics.

Biteye’s village is a 30-mile drive from here on a potholed road, past herds of skinny cattle. Almost all the men in the village can recite verses from the Quran, especially the boy’s grandfather, Baba Biteye, a wrinkled man who taught the holy book for 40 years before going blind.

The old man becomes agitated when asked about his grandson. He is angry not because of the severe beating, but because the boy’s father — his son — dared press charges against the teacher, or marabout.

“It was an accident, and my son had no right to humiliate the marabout by doing what he did,” he says. “The day they took the marabout to prison, it hurt me so much it was as if they had come to jail me.”

No one in this poor village is surprised that the boy was beaten. A child needs to suffer, the grandfather says, to master the difficult text. It’s a sentiment that is echoed in the village chief’s hut, under the grass roofs of neighbors’ homes and on the lips of other families whose own sons are still in the jailed teacher’s boarding school.

At first, even the father thought his son was lying about why he was beaten. The marabout told investigators that he hit the boy for mispronouncing a verse from the Quran.

But when the father saw his son, he wept. “I knew that he would be hit — but I didn’t think he would be hit up to this point,” says Biteye.

The boy says when he arrived at the school in June, his marabout handed him a can and told him not to come back before filling it with 200 francs (about 50 cents).

The boy also had to beg for food. Some days all he got was a discarded fish head or a spoonful of rice.

By the second week, he was hungry all the time. On July 2, he begged until dark and got the 50 cents, but spent part of it on biscuits. When the marabout found out, the boy says, he got whipped until the skin on his back fell off. Hospital officials believe the whip was laced with metal.

Momodou Biteye’s marabout is still awaiting trial. The father said he had no money for medicine, much less a lawyer or the multiple bus trips to the police station to file charges. But a Swiss aid group agreed to pay for hospital fees and help with transportation.

So when police asked the father to file charges, he did. Already, an organization representing 700 Quranic instructors has denounced him, calling him a bad Muslim and a puppet of Western donors.