To understand this, one must look at what life was like prior to the Crusades. Leadership in Islam was scattered; caliphs ruled small portions of the land and left behind many sons and prospective heirs when they died. Therefore, successions were often decided with wars or division of the kingdom among heirs, which could include brothers, sons, and uncles. Even at the very highest level of power �every monarchy was threatened by the death of its monarch and every transmission of power provoked civil war� (Maalouf 262). The Islamic nations were prime targets for foreign invaders such as the Kurds, the Seljuk and the Ottoman Turks. After several conquests and transfers of power, Arab leaders were mostly comprised of people from the aforementioned tribes which caused the Muslims to be unable to control �their own destiny as early as the ninth century� (261). While most of these foreign leaders had embraced Arabic culture, some did not. Most prominently was the case of the Seljuk Turks, the ruling tribe during the Crusades, who were still unable to speak the native language (Maalouf 262). This infiltration of foreigners even went so far as to replace most of the army with non-Arabs, who would not defend their adopted nation with the same zeal that a native would. Only leaders in very low positions within the governmental structure were actually native Islamic men and none had the power or wherewithal to unite the Muslim people against any further major threats, such as those posed by the Crusaders advancing on their land. Eventually, Arabs were treated like the oppressed minority in their own land and often had to perform the most menial tasks. Arabs began to feel a great mistrust toward foreigners who had constantly conquered and then oppressed them, but this mistrust did not flourish fully until after the Crusades when the foreigners who had previously exhibited no interest in them, now began to frequently attack.
The governmental furor then translated into another weakness for the Arabs before the Crusades began: an inability to unite under a single leader. The government had distanced itself even further from the people through use of emirs who were �petty leaders� (Hallam 60) who acted as middle-men in a certain town. They answered to caliphs who answered to the sultans, so there was a large gap that prevented much accurate communication to the sultan, who made most of the decisions. In addition to succession problems on a smaller scale, there was friction within the Muslim religion itself as to who should ascend the throne over a united Islam. According to Hallam, Sunnites, who followed not only the Koran but also the Sunna, supported the Umayyad and Abbasid lines as the legitimate heirs to the throne that Mohammed had left (61). Although they were considered the Orthodox sect of Islam, a second group, the Shi�ites, was gaining followers and began to gain even more after the Crusades were over. They expected that a leader would miraculously appear to unite them, but denied that this leader would come from the Umayyad or Abbasid lines, since a member of the former family had killed the cousin of Mohammed in battle. They solely followed the Koran and were the more aggressive of the two sects. With the Muslim world divided in so many ways and ruled by foreigners, there was, at first, only scattered resistance to the Crusaders until Saladin entered the scene. He brought unification previously unseen but after the Crusades, this fell apart due to pressure from later Crusades and the Muslim world was scattered again.
Despite the turmoil within the Arab nations, relationships with the Christian West prior to the Crusades were more or less very positive, a fact which changed after Christian attacks on Muslim lands. There was a very high tolerance within Muslim borders for adherants of other religions. �Christians and Jews, who remained the majority of the population until the 10th or 11th century, were seen as ��people of the Book� adherants of religions which were in some way�the product of divine guidance�� (Hallam 19). Therefore, Christians and Jews were protected by law, especially on pilgrimages into Jerusalem, the Holy Land where along the way, not all of the Arabs were entirely friendly toward the pilgrims.