He affirmed the policies of his father, Hassan Ala Dhikrihi's Salam, who had been stabbed to death a year after proclaiming Qiyāma, or Resurrection (interpreted in a spiritual esoteric manner of the truth being unveiled with the Ismailis in this case).
Bernard Lewis writes in "The Assassins" (London, 1967, p. 95) that, "Hassan was succeeded by his son Muhammad, who proceeded to confirm that his father and therefore he himself were descendants of Nizar, and subsequent Imams.
South of the Aral sea lay the land of Khawaraz in Central Asia, the seat of an old civilization, whose hereditary rulers assumed the old title of the kings as the Khwarazmshahs.
The triumphant Khawarazmshah was the obvious ruler to fill the vacancy created by the Seljuqs, and in the following year, the Abbasid caliph Nasir (d. 622/1225) invested Alauddin Tekish with the sultanate of western Iran, Khorasan and Turkistan.
We come across an instance of Ustandar Hazarasf bin Shahrnush (560-586/1164-1190), the Baduspanid ruler of Rustamdar and Ruyan, who had harboured himself at Alamut.
When his relation deteriorated with his superior, Husam ad-Dawla Ardashir (567-602/1172-1206), the Bawandid Ispahbad of Mazandarn, he took refuge at Alamut as a result.
It is tough to definitively distinguish what Hassan Ala Dhikrihi's Salam proclaimed compared to his son Nūru-d-Dīn Muḥammad II because the latter only began to rule a year and a half after he Festival of Qiyāma, and we do not have a source about this from Hassan Ala Dhikrihi's Salam with which to compare the words of Nūru-d-Dīn Muḥammad II.
The doctrine of Qiyāma was not observed by outside groups apparently, and politically Lewis claims that the period of Muhammad II was relatively uneventful, other than the assassination of a vizier of the caliph in Baghdad.
[11] There was more interaction with and knowledge of the Syrian Nizārī Ismā'īlī community during this period, which was led the da'i Rashid al-Din Sinan, famously known as "the Old Man of the Mountain" from Crusader sources.
[13] The "Qiyāma" in Nizārī Ismā'īlī doctrine (at least of this period of Hasan 'Ala Dhikrihi's Salam and Nūr al-Dīn Muḥammad II) is the spiritual resurrection.
[14] This Qiyāma involves the qā'im (also known as qā'im-i qiyāmat or Resurrector of the Resurrection, which is a rank higher than an ordinary Imām) who comes in the seventh cycle of Ismaili cosmology to reveal the true, inner meaning of the law.
Nūr al-Dīn Muḥammad II gave the doctrine more in detail and developed it, for example by indicating that the true spiritual reality of the Imām was what was important and that Nizārī Ismā'īlīs who could perceive this and achieve a personal transformation were the successful ones.
Nasir al-Din Tusi further elaborated and reconciled the doctrine of Qiyāma, in his Rawdāt al-taslim (Garden of Submission), where he insists that the Qiyāma is not just a single event at the end of time, but it's a transitory period where the unveiled truth, or hāqiqā (spirituality and the eternal truth of religion), is revealed.
Jalāl al-Dīn made some drastic changes to the doctrine and practices of the Ismailis, at least apparently, and it is claimed by some authors that he was dissatisfied with the Qiyāma.
"[17] Contemporary Sunni sources mention nothing about the Qiyāma of the Nizārī Ismā'īlīs of the Alamūt period, and some historians claim that this period and knowledge of its events apparently remained confined to the Nizārī Ismā'īlīs until the Mongols destroyed Alamut Castle, and Sunnis found their writings there (and wrote about it decades later).
[19][20] However, there is one anonymous Nizārī Ismā'īlī treatise extant, named Haft Bab-i Baba Sayyidna, dating to the time of Muhammad II that provides us with some understanding of the doctrine of the qiyāma from this period.