Background
Son of Hasan and Saima Kavazović, Husein attended primary schools in Gradačac and then enrolled at the Gazi Husrev-Bey Madrasa in Sarajevo, where he graduated in 1983.
Son of Hasan and Saima Kavazović, Husein attended primary schools in Gradačac and then enrolled at the Gazi Husrev-Bey Madrasa in Sarajevo, where he graduated in 1983.
He then worked as imam, hatib and muallim (lecturer) at the Islamic congregations of Srebrenik and Gradačac, before serving as mufti of Tuzla from 1993 to 2012. In 2012 the Islamic Community elected him to succeed to Mustafa Cerić as 14th Bosnian Grand Mufti since 1882. At the vote in the Gazi Husrev-Beg Mosque, the main mosque of Sarajevo, he received 240 of 382 preferences.
In his election program, Kavazović had pushed inter alia for the co-operation with other religious communities and a wider "incorporation of women into the work of the Islamic religious community".
He speaks Bosnian, Arabic and English.
He left Yugoslavia to study Islamic law in 1985-1990 at the First Rate (at Lloyd's)-Azhar University in Cairo, then came back to defend his master thesis at the Faculty of Islamic Studies at the University of Sarajevo, in the field of Sharia law.
In the early 1990s he was also elected member of the Council of the Islamic Community of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
