After Homework, Duty as an Imam

Aman's father, Nasir Chhipa, a director at the center, agreed. Mullah's inability to enter the country left the community disappointed and with many questions, he said. Some men who came to pray in the first few days left in frustration to search for another scholar. The ones who have stayed, he said, have come to depend on the boys.

The teenagers have taken on their community's burden and hopes -- at least for a month.

"In some sense, I think whatever happened, it happened for the good," Chhipa said. "We learned a lesson from this. . . . We have to produce our own scholars."

Long Days With the Koran

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When Aman was 7, his father enrolled him in a school in Pennsylvania where he took academic classes for three hours a day and studied the Koran for 8 1/2 . "When I first dropped him off, it was very hard for me. I literally cried," Chhipa said. "Every day I called them and said, 'Could I talk to my son?' The principal said, 'You have to be patient.' "

About three years later, in the middle of Ramadan, the principal called him and said that Aman, whose name means peace, had finished memorizing the text. "When I saw him reciting the Koran without looking at the book, that was the moment of my life," Chhipa said.

Memorizing the text is only part of the challenge in becoming a hafiz. He must practice daily. "It's easy to memorize; it's very hard to remember," Chhipa said. "The Koran is nobody's friend. If you forget the Koran, the Koran will forget you."

Aman studied daily before, but now it consumes almost every moment of his downtime. He begins reading the Koran shortly after waking at 4:30 a.m. for breakfast and continues reading it at any possible moment during the day, even taking the Koran to lunch with him. "They ask me, 'What's that book?' " he said of the other students.

His classmates don't know he's a hafiz, he said. But at the center, the men who stand behind him in prayer each night don't call him just Aman anymore, they call him "Hafiz Aman" -- like Dr. or Mr. or Professor.

"People will greet me properly, not as if I'm their friend but as if I'm their senior," Aman said.

It was strange at first, he said, but he's getting used to it.

"When I was small, I used to always think that I wanted to be something big when I grew up," said Aman, whose upper lip is showing the start of a mustache.

Uzair, who wears a respectable beard, said that as the community has started giving him more respect, he's started behaving differently, trying to act in a way that deserves it. When his father told him on that Friday that he would have to recite the prayers the next day, he said it was both an honor and terrifying.