Fetullah Gülen, rival of Turkish President Erdogan, has died at the age of 83.

US-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen, accused by Turkish authorities of staging a failed coup in 2016, has died in exile in the United States at the age of 83, his website said staff.

Turkish public television said the preacher, who had lived in Pennsylvania since 1999 and was stripped of his Turkish citizenship in 2017, died at the hospital where he was being treated.

Gülen’s website Herkul, banned in Türkiye, said the imam died on “October 20.”

Gülen was a rival of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and after his exile, Erdogan’s government accused Gülen of attempting a coup in 2016 and his Hizmet movement of being a “terrorist” group. He denied the accusations.

Hizmet, meaning “service” in Turkish, operates a network of Islamic schools around the world and has become an influential but opaque group. It seeks to propagate a moderate Islam that promotes Western-style education, the free market and interfaith communication.

Gulen allied himself with Erdogan to help him win elections in the 2000s, but became a sworn enemy of the Turkish president after disagreements began in 2010.

Erdogan launched a crackdown on Gülen’s supporters after allegations of corruption were made in 2013 against the president’s Justice and Development Party.

Erdogan said the investigators were Gülen supporters.

The so-called failed coup against Erdogan in 2016 widened the divide.

The president accused Gülen of organizing the coup, 3,000 Gülen supporters were sentenced to life in prison, and legal proceedings were initiated against 700,000 people.

Around 125,000 civil servants, including 24,000 soldiers and thousands of investigating magistrates, were dismissed.

Known to his supporters as Hodjaefendi, or respected teacher, Gülen was born in a village in the eastern Turkish province of Erzurum in 1941. The son of an imam, or Islamic preacher, he studied the Holy Quran from a very young age.

In 1959, Gülen was appointed imam of a mosque in the northwestern city of Edirne, and began to become known as a preacher in the 1960s in the western province of İzmir, where he opened dormitories for students and went to teahouses to preach.

These student houses marked the beginning of an informal network that expanded over the following decades across education, business, media and public institutions, giving its supporters great influence.

This influence also extended beyond Turkish borders to the Turkic Republics of Central Asia, the Balkans, Africa and the West through a network of schools.