A court in Russia has sentenced a prominent Islamic scholar to 6 1/2 years in prison for reportedly running a branch of a banned religious group.

According to RFE/RL, the scholar who is identified as Gabdrakhman Naumov was sentenced on November 2 by a court in Kazan for leading a branch of the Islamic Nur movement, his lawyer; Ruslan Nagiyev said.

Naumov is well-known in Tatarstan as a teacher at the Russian Islamic University and the former imam of a mosque in Kazan. He was arrested in March 2020 and charged with being the leader of the Nur movement in Tatarstan, where Turkic-speaking ethnic Tatars live.

The Nur movement was founded in Turkey by prominent Islamic scholar Said Nursi, who before his death in 1960 had advocated against communist secularism and for the integration of modern science and logic into Islam.

The movement has millions of followers around the globe, especially in Turkey, but has been banned in Russia since 2008.

Russian authorities have said the group promotes the creation of an Islamic state that encompasses all Turkic-speaking areas and countries.

Meanwhile, a top Russian security official met the visiting chief of the Central Intelligence Agency on Tuesday, a rare encounter amid tensions between Moscow and Washington.

Nikolai Patrushev, the powerful secretary of the Kremlin’s Security Council, met CIA Director William Burns in Moscow to discuss U.S.-Russian relations, Patrushev’s office said in a statement. Patrushev, is a longtime close associate of Putin. He is considered one of Russia’s most influential officials.