What to do with old madrasa and Sunday school books
It's the pile in the corner of the classroom at the end of term. Or the box your now-teenaged child won't touch — the one with the Qaidah they finished at age seven, their first beginner Quran with the teacher's red pen marks, the exercise books full of surahs they wrote out again and again. Useful once. Irreplaceable to no one. Respectful to bin? Definitely not.
The material that accumulates in madrasas, Islamic Sunday schools, and Muslim households with school-age children has a specific shape — and a specific answer. Here's how to handle it.
The four types of old school material
Most of what builds up falls into one of four categories, each with a different right answer:
- Usable teaching books: Qaidahs, tajweed primers, beginner mushafs, sirah books, Islamic studies textbooks that are structurally sound. Give these a second life (see below).
- Students' completed exercise books: Workbooks where a child wrote out surahs, du'as, hadith. These contain Qur'anic script in handwriting, and need the same respect as printed material.
- Marked, annotated, or torn copies: Qurans and Qaidahs with pen marks, torn spines, missing pages, or coffee stains from the staff room. These are past the point of re-use.
- Loose and fragmentary paper: Printed handouts, surah photocopies, tajweed worksheets, single-sheet du'a prints, end-of-year certificates with verses on them. High-volume and easy to underestimate.
Category 1: Usable teaching books
If a Qaidah, mushaf, or textbook is structurally sound, it wants to be used. Routes that work well:
- Pass to a younger cohort. Most madrasas rotate beginner material year on year. A Qaidah that's been through two terms can often do five.
- Donate to newer / poorer madrasas. Across the UK there are small madrasas with thin budgets running on volunteer time. A call to the mosque office finds them quickly.
- Send overseas. Several UK Muslim charities ship educational Islamic material to madrasas in East Africa, South Asia, and the Balkans. Ring first — some only accept specific titles.
- Offer to local Muslim home-educators. A post in a regional Muslim home-ed group shifts material within hours.
Category 2: Students' completed exercise books
This is the category that most catches parents off-guard. "It's just my kid's notebook from when they were eight." But if the pages contain verses of the Qur'an, the name of Allah, or hadith written out by the child's hand, the fiqh treats them the same as printed religious material.
You don't need to keep every single exercise book a child ever wrote in — that way lies a loft that never empties. The practical compromise most families reach:
- Keep one sentimental exemplar — the first Qaidah they finished, or one completed Juz' workbook. These are meaningful family keepsakes.
- Bury the rest respectfully once the child has moved on from that stage.
Waiting until a child has completed their primary madrasa education (often around age 11–13 in the UK) before doing a single pass of bereavement is emotionally easier than disposing of material as you go.
Category 3: Marked, annotated, or torn copies
A Qaidah with a year of a seven-year-old's pencil marks, a beginner Quran with the teacher's tajweed corrections, a tafsir textbook with the spine separating — these are past the point where they can go back into circulation.
They can't be photocopied into recycling; they shouldn't be discreetly binned. They need burial. For a whole madrasa's end-of-year cleanout, this can be a meaningful volume — we've worked with madrasas running a single termly or yearly pickup to keep it manageable.
Category 4: Loose and fragmentary paper
Individually, a printed handout of Surah al-Fatihah seems trivial. But photocopied verses, tajweed exercise sheets, du'a booklets handed out at mawlid, and end-of-year certificates with Qur'anic quotations on them add up to genuinely large volumes of paper per madrasa per year.
All of this paper contains verses and should not be put in normal paper recycling — commercial paper recycling pulps everything together and verses end up in unknown, unrelated products.
The pragmatic approach: set aside a "burial box" at the back of the madrasa staffroom. Anything going out that contains Qur'anic text goes into the box, not the recycling. When the box fills, send it once.
"A madrasa that teaches children to respect the Qur'an and then puts their finished surahs in the council recycling bin is teaching one lesson with its mouth and another with its hands."
For madrasa administrators: a simple annual process
Many madrasas we work with have settled on this cadence:
- End of each term: Teachers sort classroom shelves; useable material goes to the "pass-down" shelf for the next cohort; worn material goes into the burial box.
- End of academic year: The burial box plus completed student workbooks (with parents' consent) go in one consolidated parcel or pallet collection.
- Tell the parents. A short note home explaining the process lets parents opt in or take their child's workbooks home instead. Transparency prevents surprises.
This turns a creeping, never-resolved problem into a predictable once-a-year task.
Common questions from parents and teachers
My child threw their Qaidah in the recycling. What should I do?
If it's still retrievable, retrieve it. If not, there's no action to undo — but treat it as a teaching moment rather than a religious crisis. Children learn by watching how adults handle these moments calmly.
Can my madrasa donate worn Qurans to the local mosque?
Only with the mosque's explicit agreement. Turning up with a bag of torn mushafs at the mosque office creates the exact storage problem that services like ours exist to solve. Always ring ahead.
We have boxes of old material going back ten years. Is this going to be expensive?
Not necessarily. Our pricing is per kg, so volume is what matters — not age, not variety, not sorting. A ten-year backlog in three bin-bags is one parcel. Ten years of weekly handouts sitting in a store cupboard might be better handled as a pallet collection. Either way, drop us a note with your postcode and we'll give you a concrete number.
Is there Islamic evidence that children's written exercises need burial?
Classical jurists addressed the general principle: anything on which the Qur'an or the name of Allah has been inscribed deserves protection from disrespect. They didn't specifically rule on children's copybooks because those weren't common — but the principle covers them. Contemporary scholars (including Darul Iftaa Birmingham) consistently apply the same rule.
If we can help your madrasa
We offer discounted termly and annual collection schemes for madrasas across the UK. If your institution is clearing a full store-cupboard or planning an end-of-year process, contact us with your postcode, rough volume, and timing — and we'll send a tailored quote.
For smaller parcels (one or two boxes of a child's old workbooks), the instant calculator gives you a price in under a minute.