Page 122 - Special Topic Session (STS) - Volume 1

STS419 Liza M. et al.
1. Introduction
The teachings of Islam postulates that a society will prosper if all
individuals are given equal opportunity and resources to attain a decent
standard of living. A decent standard of living goes beyond the minimum
standard of basic provisions for food, clothing, housing, medical care, and
social services, as mentioned in article 25 (1) of the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights (United Nations General Assembly, 1948). According to the
Icelandic Human Rights Centre (2014), the minimum requirement of an
adequate standard of living is the ability for all individuals to be a full
participant in ordinary and dignified day-to-day interactions. It goes further to
state that the conditions should not allow a person to have to satisfy their
needs by degrading themselves or depriving their basic freedom. Notably,
Iceland was ranked 2018’s happiest country by World Happiness Report and
th
was ranked 4 in 2019 (Helliwell, J., Layard, R., & Sachs, J. 2018, 2019). This is
coherent to the Islamic perspective that a society can only thrive if all
individuals are given access to resources and equality of opportunity to
achieve a decent standard of living. As these individuals become active market
participants and consume, produce or trade, the resulting income gained are
considered justly earned. In order to achieve this, Islam ordains for a portion
of this income of an able individual to be distributed through a “redemption
of rights” of those within the population who are unable to actively participate
in earning an income due to the circumstances of their lives such as disabilities,
injuries, illness, disabilities, bankruptcies or other factors.
The process of redemption by the less abled members of the society
should be operationalised through redistributive risk-sharing social finance
instruments. Advances in the digital landscape can be utilised to develop
sophisticated application of these instruments to address the existing
challenges of poverty, inequality and unjust distribution of income. As
technology becomes increasingly pervasive, information generated from
digital sources as people go about in their daily lives has the potential to reveal
trends, preferences, struggles and overall well-being. The amount of digital
data being produced is at a rate of 2.5 quantillion bytes of data per day
(Jacobson, R. 2013). Between the year 2000 and 2019, the global internet
usage grew by 1,104% to an estimated 4.3 billion users, which is 56% of the
estimated total global population of 7.7 billion people (Internet World Stats,
2019). This trend will likely continue as more businesses shift their Business
Models into the digital space to gain a competitive advantage (Harry, B., Mark,
R., and Shahrokh, N. 2017).
The prevalence of interactions and transactions in the digital realm has
generated a superfluous amount of data, otherwise known as ‘Big Data’. Big
data is a term that refers to rapidly generated unstructured data. Big Data is
gathered as a biproduct of a business and administration system, social

111 | I S I W S C 2 0 1 9