Daewa is a modern organizational term rather than a classical doctrinal category.

Evidence

Few Islamic concepts capture the sensibility of modern socioreligious activism and the spirit ofdoctrinal innovation better than the concept of daewa. Da ewa is the umbrella term under which the mosque movement, and the Islamist movement more generally, have organized many of their disparate activities. Daewa literally means “call, invitation, appeal, or summons.” It is a Quranic concept associated primarily with God’s call to the prophets and to humanity to believe in the “true religion,” Islam. Dac: did not receive much doctrinal attention in classical Sunni Islamic scholarship, and it was only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that it was given extensive elabora.. tion. The term da eiya literally means “one who practices daewa”-it is also the label used for the teachers in the women’s mosque movement. — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 409

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies that daewa (“call/invitation”) is a Quranic concept elaborated as an organizational term only in the late 19th-20th century — a historically recent coinage.
• QUESTION: The late-modern emergence of daewa parallels how other ‘traditional’ Islamic categories (jihad, sharia) get retrofitted for modern movements — worth mapping to scholarship on invented tradition.