Broadly speaking, there has been a relative dearth of coverage on this era in locally published histories, and severe underuse of Arab sources even by Arab writers, who have of late been criticised for being mired in nineteenth-century thinking and fond of endlessly reusing the same handful of accounts.

In this context, Carole Hillenbrand's The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (1999) is one of the most important new works in the field. Hillenbrand acknowledges that western scholars - while far less likely now than previously to treat the Crusades as in any sense an heroic episode - have focused almost entirely on the experience of westerners, and worked from western sources... all too often seeing the local Islamic powers and their people as an opposed "other". However, she also highlights the prevalence of a “reverse orientalism” among many Islamic scholars. Hillenbrand argues that they are guilty of comparing Western involvement in the medieval Middle East (that is, the Crusades) both with late nineteenth-century Western imperialism in the same region, and recent events such as the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq. For example, the Palestinian poet and novelist Mahmud Darwish referred to Israeli troops as “leftover Crusaders” in his writings.

Ironically, these Islamic scholars have developed their theories using the very ideas and narratives that “orientalist” Western scholars had formulated to frame their own postcolonial narratives. For example, Hillenbrand states that in the hands of historians such as Muhammad al-‘Arusi al-Matwi, the Crusades were transformed into a sort of “protocolonialism” and the Crusader states “protocolonies” (essentially framing the Crusades as the first stages in a longer-term campaign of colonisation). However, this flies in the face of contemporary Muslim thinking on the nature of the Crusaders’ presence in the Levant at the time. Hillenbrand argues that the Crusades must be studied without the muddying and anachronistic effect that modern comparisons bring (an anachronism is something mistakenly placed in a time where it does not belong.) She insists that the notions of modern international relations and even religiosity bear no relation to those of centuries before, when such concepts did not exist.

The difficulty in actually obtaining and using some Islamic sources for this period is highlighted by the fact that Hillenbrand herself was only afforded access to a copy of the Kitab al-Jihad by the Syrian scholar Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami at the last moment, thereby enabling it to be included in her text. This treatise, published in 1105, was the first to preach jihad (in this context, a defensive battle) against the newly arrived Christian Crusaders, calling for a coordinated Muslim counterattack. Several other texts included in the book, such as the twelfth- and thirteenth-century historian Ali ibn al-Athir’s Universal History, had previously been largely unavailable to Western and Muslim scholars due to the lack of an acceptable translation. Yet both of these works were essential for building a complete narrative of the evolution of Arabic thought on the Crusades, and concepts such as jihad, from the fall of Jerusalem in 1099 to the end of the Crusader presence on the mainland Levant in 1291.

Hillenbrand stresses that the interfaith relations of the Crusading period were not invariably antagonistic, as is popularly assumed. In fact, for Muslims, the book offers a revelatory new narrative, using twelfth- and thirteenth-century Islamic scholars and writers to show that the Crusades were not an era of unremitting warfare or strife, that in fact there were periods of peaceful coexistence between Christians and Muslims. Hillenbrand also uses her sources to explore daily life in the Crusader states for both Muslims and Christians, the lives of women, and the evolution of understandings of the term “jihad.”

Thankfully, it has now become commonplace for introductory overviews and histories of the Crusades to make extensive use of Islamic sources and perspectives. Two such examples are David Nicolle’s The Crusades and Jonathan Phillips’s The Crusades 1095–1197, in which Phillips refers to Hillenbrand’s book as a “landmark work” that allows “a fuller and clearer appreciation of the impact of the Crusades in the Eastern Mediterranean.” He cites as examples Hillenbrand’s detailed examination of the relationship between Arabic forces and the sea, and the way she revealed the previously little-understood personality of the twelfth-century leader Imad ad-Din Zengi. Though Zengi’s success in bringing about the first major defeat of Crusader forces earned him a hero’s reputation, Hillenbrand portrays him as a tyrannical and reckless despot.

Unsurprisingly, Hillenbrand’s work has also had an impact in discussions of terrorism and ongoing relations between the West and the Muslim world, particularly in the context of the ongoing "War on Terror". For instance, J. M. B. Porter cites the authentic medieval Muslim voices in her work to refute “recent Muslim—particularly Arab—scholarship which reinterprets the Crusades in light of the nineteenth and twentieth century history of colonialism, Arab nationalism, and the creation of the Israeli state.”