massacring the Ismailis. It is reported, for instance, according to Ibn Athir (12th vol., pp. 76–7) that a bulk of people accused of Ismailism were killed in lower Iraq in the year 600/1204. Succession Nūr ad-Dīn Muḥammad II was born in Alamut Castle. When he ascended to leadership of Alamūt, he immediately avenged his father's death by executing his father's killer, Hasan ibn Namawar (who apparently could not tolerate the reforms and claims of Hassan Ala Dhikrihi's Salam and wanted to reinstate shari'ah) and the latter's relatives upon succeeding his father at nineteen years old. This act put to rest all of the remaining members of the Buyid dynasty. Doctrinal development and elaboration Muhammad II is known to have been a prolific writer, and he developed and elaborated on his father's doctrine of the Qiyāma. He explicitly confirmed that his father had been in fact a Nizārī Ismā'īlī Imām, and that he himself was an Imām as well. Whereas the founder of the "Qiyāma" doctrine Hassan Ala Dhikrihi's Salam is believed to have only claimed to have been an "Imām in hāqiqā" and in the "batin at most", not claiming to be the "zahir Imām" actually descended from Ali and the Nizārī Ismā'īlī Imāms. Nūr ad-Dīn Muḥammad II claimed an alternate genealogy for his father and himself which denied descent from Muhammad b. Buzurg-Ummid, who was only an apparent father, but rather insisted that his father was "the son of a descendant of Nizar who had secretly found refuge in a village near Alamūt." The Nizārī Ismā'īlīs accepted the line of Imāms starting with Hassan Ala Dhikrihi's Salam (in retrospect) and understood them as having come out in the open once again after seventy years (as their Imām was in concealment since the time of Nizar). One of the most important things that Qiyāma meant on a practical level was the nullification of Islamic law, since the batin (inner reality) had been unveiled by the Nizārī Ismā'īlī Imāms, and the true "meanings hidden behind" the law had become manifest. The early chroniclers of this period (meaning Sunni historians decades after the event) cite this overturning of the law as the main reason that the Nizārī Ismā'īlīs were further condemned and considered malāhīda, a condemnatory term that could mean heretic or non-believer, for instance. It is claimed that Nūru-d-Dīn Muḥammad II insisted that the Ismaili believers could see Allah in the