Alija Izetbegović

Izetbegović was born on 8 August 1925 in the town of Bosanski Šamac. While serving as a soldier in Üsküdar, Izetbegović's paternal grandfather Alija, from Belgrade, married a Turkish woman named Sıdıka Hanım. The couple eventually moved to Bosanski Šamac and had five children. Izetbegović's grandfather later became the town's mayor.

Izetbegović's father, an accountant, had fought for the Austro-Hungarian Army on the Italian Front during World War I and sustained serious injuries which left him in a semi-paralyzed state for at least a decade. He declared bankruptcy in 1927. The following year, the family moved to Sarajevo, where Izetbegović received a secular education.

In 1941, Izetbegović helped to found a Bosnian Islamist organization named "Young Muslims" (Mladi Muslimani), which was modeled after the Muslim Brotherhood. The "Young Muslims" became torn between supporting the largely Muslim Waffen-SS Handschar Division or the communist Yugoslav Partisans. The New York Times claims he joined the SS Handschar, despite a lack of evidence. Izetbegović's family denied the claim and claimed that he had joined the communist Yugoslav Partisans. Izetbegović was detained by the Serb royalist Chetniks in mid-1944, but released by Chetnik voivode Dragutin Keserović.

After the war, due to his association with the "Young Muslims" and opposition to the regime, Izetbegović was arrested by the Yugoslav communist authorities in 1946 and sentenced to three years in prison. After serving his sentence, he went on to earn a law degree at the University of Sarajevo's Faculty of Law in 1956 and remained actively engaged in politics.

In 1970, Izetbegović published a manifesto entitled the Islamic Declaration, expressing his views on relationships between Islam, state and society. The manifesto was banned by the government. In it, he tried to reconcile Western-style progress with Islamic tradition. The work issued a call for "Islamic renewal" without mentioning Yugoslavia specifically. However, he and his supporters were accused by the Communist authorities of reviving the "Young Muslims" organisation and of a conspiracy to set up an "Islamically pure" Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The declaration designated Pakistan as a model country to be emulated by Muslim revolutionaries worldwide. One of the passages that was in particular picked out by his opponents during the trial was, "There can be no peace or coexistence between the Islamic faith and non-Islamic social and political institutions...the state should be an expression of religion and should support its moral concepts." The declaration remains a source of controversy. Serbs, who were opposed to Izetbegović, often quoted the declaration as indicative of an intent to create an Iranian-style Islamic republic in Bosnia.

He himself later insisted many times that the statements about the creation of an Islamic state were hypothetical and were not to be the applied to the situation in Bosnia. Regardless, Bosnia's non-Muslim population were unsettled by several of his statements in his writings. Passages from the declaration were frequently quoted by Izetbegović's opponents during the 1990s, who considered it to be an open statement of Islamic fundamentalism. This opinion is also shared by some Western authors. Izetbegović vigorously denied these accusations.

After his initial arrest in 1946, Izetbegović was sentenced to jail in various cases in a total for 8 years for his political activities.

In April 1983, Izetbegović and twelve other Bosniak activists (including Melika Salihbegović, Edhem Bičakčić, Omer Behmen, Mustafa Spahić and Hasan Čengić) were arrested and tried before a Sarajevo court for "hostile and counter-revolutionary activity from the positions of the Muslim Nationalism". Izetbegović was further accused of organizing a visit to a Muslim congress in Iran. …

The introduction of a multi-party system in Yugoslavia at the end of the 1980s prompted Izetbegović and other Bosniak activists to establish a political party, the Party of Democratic Action (Stranka Demokratske Akcije, SDA) in 1990. It had a largely Muslim character; similarly, the other principal ethnic groups in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Serbs and Croats, also established ethnically based parties (SDS and HDZ BiH). The SDA won the largest share of the vote, 33% of the seats, with the next runners-up being nationalist ethnic parties representing Serbs and Croats. Fikret Abdić won the popular vote for Presidency member among the Bosniak candidates, with 44% of the vote, Izetbegović with 37%. According to the Bosnian constitution, the first two candidates of each of the three constitutient nations would be elected to a seven-member multi-ethnic rotating presidency (with two Croats, two Serbs, two Bosniaks and one Yugoslav); a Croat took the post of prime minister and a Serb the presidency of the Assembly. Abdić agreed to stand down as the Bosniak candidate for the Presidency and Izetbegović became Chairman of the Presidency.

Bosnia and Herzegovina's power-sharing arrangements broke down very quickly as ethnic tensions grew after the outbreak of fighting between Serbs and Croats in neighboring Croatia. Although Izetbegović was due to hold the presidency for only one year according to the constitution, this arrangement was initially suspended due to "extraordinary circumstances" and was eventually abandoned altogether during the war as the Serb and Croat nationalistic parties SDS and HDZ BiH abandoned the government. When fighting broke out in Slovenia and Croatia in the summer of 1991, it was immediately apparent that Bosnia and Herzegovina would soon become embroiled in the conflict. Izetbegović initially proposed a loose confederation to preserve a unitary Bosnian state and strongly urged a peaceful solution. He did not subscribe to the "peace at all costs" view and commented in February 1991 that "I would sacrifice peace for a sovereign Bosnia and Herzegovina ... but for that peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina I would not sacrifice sovereignty." He abandoned the Zulfikarpašić–Karadžić agreement which would see Bosnia as a sovereign state in a confederation with Serbia and Montenegro, with 60% of Sandžak ceded to Bosnia.

On 6 October 1991, Izetbegović gave a televised proclamation of neutrality, it included the statement "it is not our war". Izetbegović made a statement before the Bosnian parliament on 14 October with regard to the JNA: "Do not do anything against the Army. (...) the presence of the Army is a stabilizing factor to us, and we need that Army... Until now, we did not have problems with the Army, and we will not have problems later." Izetbegović had a testy exchange with Bosnian Serb leader and SDS president Radovan Karadžić in parliament on that day. …

Izetbegović died on 19 October 2003 of heart disease complicated by injuries suffered from a fall at home. His funeral, held three days after his death, on 22 October, drew many Bosnian officials, dignitaries from 44 foreign countries, 105 members of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey and between 100,000 and 150,000 people, with his family receiving over 4,000 telegrams. Over 400 journalists attended the funeral as it was broadcast live on TV with 37 cameras.

Following Izetbegović's death there was an initiative to rename a part of the main street of Sarajevo from Ulica Maršala Tita (Marshal Tito Street) and the Sarajevo International Airport in his honor. Following objections from politicians from Republika Srpska, the international community, and UN envoy Paddy Ashdown, both initiatives failed.

He had a son, Bakir, who also entered politics and served as Presidency member from 2010 to 2018, as well as two granddaughters (Jasmina and Mirzeta Izetbegović).

On 11 August 2006, Izetbegović's grave at the Kovači cemetery in Sarajevo was badly damaged by a bomb. The identity of the bomber or bombers has never been determined.