Before the birth and formal establishment of the Institute for Regenerative Livelihoods (IRL), we introduced a 12-module, 60-hour course called the Islamic Gift Economy: Program for Ethical, Appropriate & Regenerative Livelihoods (IGE-PEARL). At the core of our program is the Islamic Gift Economy (IGE), an economic system based on the principles of mutual giving and receiving through fair social and commercial exchange, leading to the ethical sharing of natural and cultural abundance.
The IGE offers a holistic approach to earning a livelihood and community building that integrates material and spiritual wellbeing, bringing direction, meaning and purpose into our everyday interactions and transactions.
The IGE was conceived by Dr. Adi Setia in 2010 as a conceptual framework for reviving the ethics (adab), objectives (maqasid) and rules (fiqh) of Mu‘amalah, (by which we mean the Islamic law of transactions). The term mu‘amalah refers to commercial and social transactions among people based on the ethics of the Golden Rule, namely, that we desire for others the good that we desire for ourselves.
Originating from a year-long conversation in 2019-20 on the deep connections between Regenerative Livelihoods and Islamic ethics of transactions (mu'amalah), the IGE-PEARL initiative was launched by Mr Rhamis Kent, Dr Adi Setia, and Mrs Atika Akram. This program was carefully designed to teach the Islamic Gift Economy (IGE) through creative and contextualized re-articulation of the works of classical Muslim scholars like Imam Muhammad al-Shaybani and Imam al-Ghazali on Right Livelihood (kasb tayyib) and relating them to Social Permaculture chapter of Bill Mollison's landmark book Permaculture: a Designers' Manual.
Over the past few years, the IGE-PEARL program, has been offered in various formats, online and in-person, in both its standard 60-hour version and as a shorter introductory 20-hour course. The program provides a vision of the socio-economic domain of life as deeply connected to finding personal meaning and purpose in service to the community's common good. A pathway to sustainable living & sustainable community development.
We now offer the multi-faceted IGE-PEARL program as PEARL Essentials and PEARL Advanced.
PEARL Essentials, is a self-paced, pre-recorded, video-based course to make the program more accessible for those unable to commit to the standard 60-hour long course. This course distills the essential aspects of the program in a manner that invites deep critical thinking and soul-searching reflection on redirecting the socio-economic aspects of our life in service of Community and the Common Good.
To complement the PEARL educational program, we have been offering the carefully curated Agroecological, Right Livelihood Educational & Cultural Travel (ARLECT) experiential, immersive annual retreats, which serve to guide participants to put into personal practice some of the key concepts discussed in the PEARL courses. The retreats showcase examples of community resilience.
As a result of the PEARL courses and the ARLECT retreats, we have gradually fostered a growing community of Right Livelihood enterprising adventurers who are ever ready to trail blaze into unchartered territories to take direct action into being their own personal proofs of concept, and in the process providing relevant solutions to the pressing problems they find in their communities.
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