From 1969 to 1971, Kadyrov worked at a rice farm in the Gudermes district of the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic.
He spent the subsequent decade working for construction companies in the European part of Russia and in Siberia.
In the period between 1986 and 1988, he was deputy to the imam of Gudermes's main mosque.
In 1989, he opened an Islamic institute, the first one in the North Caucasus, and served as its president through 1994, when military operations were launched in Chechnya.
In 1990, he entered the Shariah Department of the Islamic University in the capital of Jordan, Amman, but abandoned his studies the following year to return home.
Kadyrov was appointed as Deputy Mufti of Chechnya in 1993 and as Acting Mufti in September of 1994.
During Russia's first Chechen campaign (1994-1996), he joined a Chechen militia to fight the federal forces.
In 1995, he was elected as Mufti of Chechnya, head of the Chechen Moslems' Spiritual Board in the city of Vedeno.
In 1997 to 1999 he served as head of the Spiritual Board of the self-proclaimed Chechen republic of Ichkeria. An October 10, 1999 decree by the President of Ichkeria, Chechen separatist leader Aslan Maskhadov, removed him from his post as "an enemy to the Chechen people." He survived three assassination attempts.
On June 12, 2000, Russian President Vladimir Putin appointed Kadyrov head of Chechnya's administration. He was inaugurated in the city of Gudermes on June 20, 2000. Chechen district administration heads and the Russian presidential envoy to the North Caucasus, Gen. Viktor Kazantsev, attended the ceremony.
On August 22, 2000, Kadyrov resigned as Mufti of Chechnya at a republican congress of Moslem clerics.
He won the Chechen presidency in the October 5, 2003 presidential polls.
The Russian government awarded him an International Friendship Order in 2001.
Kadyrov is survived by four children.
