Ayatollah Mohammad Reza Mahdavi Kani, the former chairman of the Assembly of Experts, fell into a coma June 4 after suffering a stroke. Despite his family members asserting that he was recovering, the 83-year-old clergyman — who had long suffered from heart disease — died Oct. 20 and ended speculation that a power struggle over his successor and an internal fight over his wealth inheritance would keep him alive for several months.

Mahdavi Kani’s death, which will be followed by two days of mourning as prompted by President Hassan Rouhani’s administration, obviously will not change the path of the Islamic Republic. But the Islamic system has lost one of its key pragmatic clerical advisers, and most importantly, someone who chaired an assembly that is tasked, at least in theory, with choosing and supervising the supreme leader of Iran.

He was also one of the diminishing number of clerics in Iran's upper echelons of power who had played a significant role in shaping the Islamic Republic.

There was no more critical era than the early 1980s in the history of the Islamic Republic. So much happened: the resignation of the first administration headed by Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan, the exodus of the Mujaheddin-e Khalq (MEK) after waves of chaos and terror, the establishment of the first militia known as the Kommiteh (the Islamic Revolutionary Committees), a constitutional change to the power structure of the regime and the US Embassy seizure. Mahdavi Kani played an influential, often pivotal, role in all of these events.