As the sun beginssetting over his mountainside dwelling, Miki Cohen takes his position under awrought iron gazebo and slowly begins to spin in the meditative dance of aWhirling Dervish. With his arms folded across his chest, he slowly picks uptempo in time with the mystical Sufi music playing on his mobile phone. Then,lifting his arms above his shoulders, he continues to turn, his eyes tightlyshut in contemplation.
For 58-year-old Cohen, this is the answer to a lifetime ofspiritual seeking, a journey that has seen him become the first Jewish Israelito gain access to the sacred ritual of the Islamic Mevlevi Sufi order -- betterknown as the Whirling Dervishes. Born into a middle-class Israeli family livingnear Tel Aviv, Cohen's odyssey began during the turbulence of the 1973 MiddleEast War when he was serving as a medic.
That experience, he says, shattered his sense of securityand forced him to start questioning everything, sending him on a decades-longsearch for peace. He eventually came across the mystical writings of Jalalal-Din Rumi, a 13th century Sufi poet from Persia whose followers set up theorder of the Whirling Dervishes after his death, with the trance-like dance acentral part of their worship. "The more I read Rumi, the closer Igot," said Cohen, dressed all in black, his long hair scraped back into aponytail.
A chance encounter on a bus put him in touch with one of theMevlevi Sufi devotees, who invited him to stay with them for a week and learntheir mystical spinning dance, known as the Sama. And there, amid the rhythmicchanting and frenetic whirling of the Dervishes, Cohen finally found theelusive peace he had been seeking.
Joining the order did not mean converting, but he went andstudied the Sufi way with them and went back to Konya last summer for a furtherround of instruction, this time travelling with Yanat Kapkin who was making adocumentary on his odyssey for the Doha-based satellite channel, Al-Jazeera. "Theseguys were much more radically religious than I expected," she said of theMevlevi order, explaining that for them, it was more of a problem to accept herin to film. "To be a woman was even more unacceptable than to be aJew," she said. They eventually relented.
These days Cohen lives on an isolated piece of land on arocky hillside covered with olive trees near the Druze villageof Jat in northwestern Israel.
