Today I read an absolutely fascinating article by Robert D. Kaplan in this coming month's Atlantic Monthly (requires username and password). I have long been skeptical of the idea of bringing Turkey into the European Union, mostly after reading Lawrence Auster and a few guys over at Frontpage Magazine. However, this single article has forced me to develop some new nuances on the issue.

Robert Kaplan, a brilliant traveller-strategist who has also had a massive amount of influence on my worldview over the years, states that Turkey and its current prime minister, the moderate Islamist Tayyip Erdogan, are "the single best hope for reconciling Muslims—from Morocco to Indonesia—with twenty-first-century social and political realities." Not only that, he says that Europe has no choice but to let Turkey into the EU.

This December a hesitant European Union will decide whether to open negotiations for Turkey to join. Its hesitancy has legitimate and illegitimate reasons. The legitimate ones center on the difficulty of digesting a country of 70 million people—one that is far poorer and more populous than many of the Central and Eastern European nations recently admitted to the EU. The illegitimate ones center on the fact that—well, Turkey is Muslim. Does Europe want that many Muslims within its community?

The answer should be that Europe has no choice. It is becoming Muslim anyway, in a demographic equivalent of the Islamic conquest of the early Middle Ages, when the Ottoman Empire reached the gates of Vienna. More to the point, Turkey is not only contiguous to Europe but also is already economically intertwined with it. The only issue that remains is whether Europe will encourage Islamic moderation through economic development in Turkey. Though American troops are fighting and dying in Iraq, ultimately the Europeans, because of geography and their own demographic patterns, have more at stake in the stabilization of the region. And the surest way to advance that stabilization is to make Turkey part of Europe.

Never before has the West been so lucky in Turkey as now. The re-Islamization of Turkey through the rejuvenation of the country's Ottoman roots was going to happen anyway; Atatürk's republican-minded secularization had simply gone too far. The only question was whether this retrenchment from Kemalism would take a radical or a moderate path. Erdogan's political leanings suggest the latter. Europe should seize the opportunity.

In the article, he goes into detail about how Erdogan is much more moderate and how he desperately tried at the last minute to get the parliament to approve allowing US troops pass through Turkey and into Iraq. It certainly makes you think, whether you agree with him or not.

Before today, I thought the only chance we had at reforming Islam would be through empowering the opposition in Iran and putting them in power, where they have strong public support in comparison to the mullahs. The only problem with my little plan is that while I'm sure all those young people and secular revolutionaries would do their best to reform Iran and Shi'ite Islam, the Shi'ites only make up about 10% of the Islamic world, so there would be very little chance that their reforms would resonate with the other 90%, the Sunnis.

If Kaplan isn't right on this, then I don't know what to do. Read it NOW --- or whenever it comes out in stores if you don't have a username and password. If you e-mail me (my e-mail is listed in many of the comments sections), I will be more than happy to reply to you with a copy of the article. I don't want to violate any copyrights by reproducing it here, though.