Thanks! Hope to address these issues, but my focus has been on al-Azhar. I focus on the establishment of da'wa at al-Azhar as an academic discipline that paved the road for the establishment of the ilm al-da'wa in the canon of the Islamic religious sciences.

I think India is part of the answer to why efforts to reform preaching were undertaken across religious communities from the 19th c. onwards: in response to Christian missionaries.

Only in the 1920s these efforts to reform preaching led to shift from wa'z to da'wa as the common term for preaching.

Of course, efforts to reform wa'z had been undertaken in the late 19th c. by a social network of scholars including Siddiq Hasan Khan, son of a preacher, Nu'man al-Alusi, from a family of preachers, and Jamal al-Din al-Qasimi, who participated in Ottoman countryside preaching tours in the 1890s.

Ali Mahfuz' textbooks for al-Azhar show that da'wa was not solely the vehicle for the "propaganda" of the Muslim Brotherhood, but also the new science of preaching - now known as da'wa instead of wa'z - at one of the most prestigious Islamic seats of knowledge, al-Azhar.

Fin

Commonly the phenomenal growth of da'wa in the 20th century has been attributed to the Muslim Brotherhood (est. 1928) while Rashid Rida's (d. 1935) dar al-da'wa wa-l-irshad (1912-1914) is widely cited as the beginning of da'wa.

This is in itself an important institutional development at al-Azhar which has been largely neglected. More interestingly, the change from wa'z to da'wa can be observed in the successive editions of the textbooks written by Ali Mahfuz. At least, this suggests there is more to the history of da'wa.

From this document, we learn that it was a waqf endowment made in 1903 that led to the establishment of the qism al-wa'z wa-l-irshad at al-Azhar fifteen years later. The connection with da'wa becomes clear as, another ten years later, the department was renamed to qism al-da'wa wa-l-irshad.

But how is this connected to da'wa? Going back to the book by Ali Mahfuz, it tells us that it was written for the department of preaching/qism al-wa'z at al-Azhar established in 1918, according to the biography of Ali Mahfuz included in the 5th edition. Fortunately, I found its foundation statutes.

Hajji Khalifa used the subject classification fi l-wa'z in his Kashf al-zunun. Other catalogues recently published, such as the catalogue of Ottoman Palace Library, also use the label. Using these sources it is possible to identify a set of semi-classics on wa'z, used by preachers known as wu''az.

The book eventually led me to study the kind of literature known in Arabic as fi l-wa'z/mawa'iz.This genre has not really been identified as such, although Linda G. Jones, Jonathan P. Berkey and others feature some examples of it in their studies of Islamic preaching. Most material is in manuscript.

Such simple questions often lead to complex answers. For da'wa, this certainly was the case. I spent several years until I fully realised what exactly I was studying. The first clue came from a course book written for the Egyptian al-Azhar by Ali Mahfuz (d.1942), a largely forgotten Azhari.