I read in a textbook that the Crusades changed the way Muslims thought about jihad, or at least refined it. I would like to know more about this. Is it related to contemporary terrorist movements?
It is 100% related to contemporary terrorist movements, but not so much to other Muslims. The answer to whether or not it changed their conception is yes, but sort of. While there are some Muslims who it has (which I'll get to), Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) is all over the place on different theological issues. To answer your question, I'll get into what Jihad is, the importance of religious justification/interpretation, and how the crusades has effected that interpretation.
Jihad in Jurisprudence Jihad is a very, very broad concept that is broken down differently by different scholars. It can encompass anything from blowing up a school bus to treating animals kindly and few interpretations are going to be considered "jihad" by all Muslims. It's meaning comes from the verb "Jaahada" meaning "to struggle" or "to strive for," generally with the connotation of the aim being admirable. Different scholars of fiqh will break down the different kinds of jihad differently, but there is a general pattern of two kinds of jihad. this gets subdivided differently depending on who you're asking, but we can lump them into two categories for our purpose.
Spiritual Jihad: A struggle against yourself and "Shaytan" to resist worldly temptations and live a good life. This includes following laws set forth to Muslims and being what many would consider a good person. The consensus is that this is an obligation for all Muslims, no exceptions. What Muslims should be doing in order to engage in spiritual jihad is, you guessed it, contested by different scholars. In fact, even within Sunni Islam, there are 4 "schools of fiqh" called Madhabs that more or less recognize each other's legitimacy as alternatives. Most Islamic scholars would consider this form of jihad to be far more important than the next kind.
Jihad in War: Within the Quran and Hadiths (a collection of sources on the life of Muhammad and his sayings), there are rules for the right practices to engage in war. On its face, it establishes an Islamic set of Laws of War including justifications for war and rules for engaging in war. This "just war theory" actually sort of parallels work laid out in the Bible and eventually by the international community in the questions it concerns itself with. It is generally very limited and considered of lesser importance.
Jihad in War Islamic scholarship on military jihad is oriented differently than scholarship on spiritual jihad. While the latter is focused on finding new ways of engaging in jihad, the former is limited and focused on finding those limits. This is reflected in communication from and among Islamic Extremists which places a strong emphasis on legitimizing their actions through Islam. This is contrary to the popular belief among many hard-line conservatives that Islam promotes this violence. It works the opposite way where perpetrators of violent actions must develop Islamic justification and gain support from Islamic scholars or lose their legitimacy, recruits, and funds. If there is anything you remember about this, it should be that there is an general understanding that physical jihad must be defensive in nature.
ISIS-AQ Split and Islamic Legitimacy We can point to the Schism between ISIS and Al-Qaeda as a prime example of hyper-violence losing legitimacy without justification. During the early days of ISIS, they were able to be brought to the negotiating table with AQ over threats that top radical Islamic scholars who frequently develop religious justifications for terrorist organizations would come out and denounce them as Islamic. ISIS stayed at the table until they were able to spread their operations to allied groups across the world (e.g. ISIS in Libya, Boko Haram, ISIS in Afghanistan, etc.) to gain legitimacy when compared to the inactive AQ leader Ayman Zawahiri. The burning of the Jordanian pilot also caused a huge stir among Islamic radicals who were extremely split over whether or not immolation was an okay form of execution. Hadiths were thrown around and analyses were compared. Almost all of ISIS' public executions are paired with the religious justification of why they feel it is Islamic. Not to spend too much time on the nitty-gritty, there is an important point here before we get to the crusades. Even among Islamic terrorists, there is immense pressure to develop religious justifications which factor heavily into perceived legitimacy and their ability to recruit personnel and financial backers who have a low bar for interpreting Islamic sources of law.
The Crusades Islamic theology, as you might have gleaned already, is very legalistic. The historical precedence derived from from the Quran, the Hadith, the lives of Muhammad's companions, and other sources function almost like constitutions, statues, and cases in common law. Scholars then use these sources combined with rules of interpretation (much like a judge) to determine what laws were handed down by God for Muslims to follow (much how God laid down laws that were specific to the Jewish people to follow in Judaism).
When it comes to pre-Crusades Islam, there was generally one set of precedence when it came to scholarship on jihad: Mohammad's own wars. These were generally against pagans who didn't have the strong commitment to faith as the military orders Muslims would fight against in the Crusades.
When the Crusades came around, Muslims were now dealing with an Invader and fighting defensive wars. The emphasis on wars. This was a series of attacks by Christian invaders providing one justification (religion) but going after another objective (wealth). I can't speak to how that affected historical conceptions of jihad, but with Christian Westerners in the Middle East in the 20th century after the decline of the Ottoman Empire, you can start to see what would very much look like yet another Crusade. Especially when these Christian Westerners are claiming to come for one purpose (to fulfill the "white man's burden" of preparing these "savages" for self government) but have another objective in mind (wealth, again), it doesn't take an Islamic Scholar to figure out where you should look for precedence.
Islamic Extremists and the Crusades I'm sure most people familiar with Islamist terrorism have heard the "Verse of the Sword." It's the verse commonly cited by people looking to demonstrate the Islam is an inherently violent religion that says something along the lines of "Go forward and kill the infidels where you find them." The issue is that those people are the only ones who talk about that verse. A massive study done by Arizona State University's Consortium for Strategic Communication found that Islamic Extremists do not use that verse at all. They talk about themselves as defenders fighting a defensive war against crusaders. Three authors who work together in that consortium had written a book on the subject called Master Narratives of Islamist Extremism which details how certain, traumatic historical events becomes frames through which a culture can interpret something. Even further, it argues that the crusades have provided a master narrative where Islamist terrorists can frame themselves as defenders and predominantly Christian, Western militiaries as crusaders. This does two things. (1) It allows them to frame these wars as defensive, overcoming the explicit restriction that military jihad must only be defensive and (2) tapping into precedence and religious justification that was used during the actual crusades. They justify the use of offensive methods by claiming that they are justified where the entire campaign is defensive in nature. The idea being that a guerrilla raid against an invading force is an offensive act in the context of a defensive war.
Conclusion On face, the idea the fighting defensive battles against invading Christian knights versus setting off bomb to kill innocents in another country doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense to most Muslims. But the bar for how much sense an analogy needs to make is much lower for someone who is looking for a reason to commit an act of violence. By providing weak justifications for drawing an analogy between the Crusades and terrorist campaigns in order to tap into the legitimacy of fiqh related to jihad as applied to the Crusades, they can get just enough people who consider them a legitimate enough group to fight with.
The Crusades, overall, didn't really affect the conception of jihad for Muslims who only participate in or concern themselves with spiritual jihad. It provides a solid set of examples for how to apply fiqh related to jihad, but that's it. But in circles of radicals who have low bars for religious justification of violence, the crusades provide a bedrock of legitimacy through which one can argue that offensive methods are justified because the ultimate goal of your campaign is defensive.
I hope I didn't ramble too much and was able to answer your question!
Master Narratives of Islamist Extremism, Halverson, Goodall, and Corman, (2011) The Concept of Jihad in Islam, Hakim, IOSR Journal of Humanities and Social Science, (2016), retrievable from http://www.iosrjournals.org/iosr-jhss/papers/Vol.%2021%20Issue9/Version-7/F2109073542.pdf Jihad Re-examined: Islamic Law and International Law, Ssenyonjo, (2012), Santa Clara Journal of International Law, retrievable from http://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1117&context=scujil
Sources Note: I've gotten a lot of info from Dabiq, ISIS' English language magazine. If it's absolutely necessary to share in order to post this, I can point to how I found it. But I'd really rather not share permanent directions on how to access that literature for personal moral reasons. I don't want to make it any easier than it is right now.