The participants did vary in their degree of Muslim committment. As usual with Muslims, most of the time, this stuff comes in waves, that hit both the infidels and Islamic slackers. The new regime brought by the wave inevitably gets corrupted and moderates itself, until its swamped by the next wave. There were several of these waves that hit Spain, for instance. The Almoravids and Almohads were two. After the combined Spanish kingdoms crushed the no-longer-as-fanatical Almohads at Las Navas de Tolosa, the subsequent overrunning of Muslim territory kept any new waves from successfully slopping over from Africa.
After Al Mansur took over the Spanish caliphate and launched a wave of death and conquest, he peaked when he destroyed the Sacred shrine of Santiago de Campostella and slaughtered hundreds of Christians there. At that point Sancho the Great, as king of a small Christian kingdom, united a group of Christian kingdoms and defeated and killed Al Mansur. That was the beginning of the end of the Moorish domination of Spain. At the beginning of the year 900 Christendom was shrunk into a small part of Europe and there were more universities in Spain than in Europe. In the space of little over a hundred years surrounding the year 1000 the Moors were driven back extensively in Spain by Christian armies, St. Stephen converted the pagan Magyars and most of the pagan Norsemen converted to Christianity. And there was the reaction of the crusades. It was a remarkable turnaround. A terrific account of it can be found in Jimmy Reston’s “The Last Apocalypse.”