Alija Izetbegović

Alija Izetbegović was born in 1925 in Bosanski Šamac, in northern Bosnia, into a Bosniak family (his grandfather had been the town’s mayor) and grew up in Sarajevo. As a student during the Second World War he joined the Young Muslims (Mladi Muslimani), an association devoted to Islamic renewal and the defence of Bosnian Muslim identity. After the communist takeover the group was suppressed, and in 1946 Izetbegović was sentenced to three years in prison. He later studied law at the University of Sarajevo and worked for many years as a legal adviser to companies.

Alongside his profession he wrote on religion and politics. The Islamic Declaration, circulated from 1970, called for the moral and political renewal of Muslim peoples and argued that Islam could not be confined to private belief. His larger work, Islam Between East and West, first published in English in 1984, presented Islam as a balance between the spiritual emphasis of Christianity and the material emphasis of modern ideologies, drawing heavily on European philosophy and literature. It became one of the most widely translated works of modern Muslim thought.

In 1983 he and twelve others were tried in Sarajevo for ‘hostile and counter-revolutionary’ activity, partly on the basis of the Declaration; he was sentenced to fourteen years, reduced on appeal, and released in 1988. His prison reflections were later published as Notes from Prison.

As Yugoslavia broke apart he founded the Party of Democratic Action in 1990 and became president of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, leading the country through the war of 1992-1995 and signing the Dayton Agreement. He stepped down from the presidency in 2000 and died in Sarajevo in October 2003. Admirers regard him as the defender of Bosnia’s survival, while critics have debated the place of his Islamic writings in his politics.