Sayed Abdullo Nuri, the Tajik Islamic leader who led his political party through a civil war against the former Soviet republic’s secular government in the 1990s, died Wednesday of cancer. He was 59.

Nuri died at his home in the capital of Dushanbe, said Muhiddin Kabiri, deputy chairman of the Islamic Renaissance Party.

The IRP is the only officially recognized Islamic political organization in predominantly Muslim Central Asia, where authoritarian governments tightly control religious institutions, fearing Islamic radicalism.

After years of playing an influential role in Tajikistan’s turbulent politics, Nuri dropped out of the public eye due to illness.

The party has since been losing influence as President Emomali Rakhmonov has tightened his grip on power, jailing both former loyalists and wartime opposition leaders on various criminal charges.

Nuri, an Islamic theologian secretly taught by his father during Soviet times, helped create the IRP in 1990, seeking a greater role for Islamic ideas and traditions in society.

In 1992, a group of party activists proclaimed a region in central Tajikistan to be an Islamic state.

An official ban ensued and many party leaders fled to Afghanistan and Iran, from where they commanded their forces during the civil war.

The war took about 100,000 lives before the party and the Moscow-backed government signed a peace deal in 1997, ending five years of fighting that left Tajikistan one of the poorest countries in the world.