The term Alay first went mainstream sometime around 2011, and it was mainly used in a pejorative sense. Alayers were roundly mocked as being not only wildly narcissistic and entirely lacking in taste, but also probably pretty kampungan, which gave a nasty edge of class snobbery to the whole thing. There were even serious campaigns to immediately unfollow or unfriend anyone you spotted using 4L4y 5tyL3 writing on social media. Exactly what prompted this anti-Alay outburst is hard to explain, but the best theory I’ve heard is that it was a moment of embarrassed reflection on the part of Indonesia’s first generation of digital natives—there was some kind of collective realization that for the past social media-dominated decade they’d all been behaving, well, kind of Alay, and that it was now time to grow up.
But Alay just won’t die. These days there are those who embrace the term—proud Alayers, no less. And even the digital hipsters aren’t beyond posting the occasional Alay selfie, usually with an #Alay hashtag—just to show that they’re being ironic, of course…
SHOW SOME RESPECT!
If the debt-inducing draw of gengsi is often a negative factor, a much more positive Indonesian universal is the value given to respect, and the idea of “softness” in interactions between people. Deep respect for your elders and superiors; avoidance of any dramatic displays of emotion, especially anger; and general politeness when talking to others: these things run deep, wherever you are in Indonesia. But if that all sounds like a recipe for stiff upper lips and starchy formality, that’s not the way it works at all. In fact, it’s precisely what underpins the easy-going social warmth of Indonesia. The emphasis is on being at ease, and making sure that others are at ease, and being polite and avoiding emotional outbursts are a big part of that.
Military order gives way to easygoing informality amongst these soldiers enjoying some downtime during a disaster relief operation in Sumatra.
The subtlety of this stuff can, naturally, make it hard for foreigners to spot it in action—and equally hard to spot transgressions. On a number of occasions I’ve been out and about with an Indonesian friend, and I’ve slowly become aware that they are angry about something. When I ask what’s up, it turns out it’s all down to some tiny deficit of politeness on the part of the waiter in a restaurant we left 20 minutes ago, or the ever-so-slightly disrespectful tone of the checkout girl in the convenience store we dropped into for phone credit—things of which I, bumbling foreigner that I am, was entirely unaware.
Inevitably, it’s also very easy for bumbling foreigners to make transgressions themselves, without ever realizing it. For example, standing with your arms folded or your hands on your hips (both poses which, unfortunately, come naturally to me) looks not just arrogant, but also downright aggressive in an Indonesian context. And getting worked up, shouting, and flapping your arms about—even if you’ve got an entirely legitimate reason to be angry—will get you absolutely nowhere.
It’s probably true to say that in modern urban Indonesia the traditional importance of respect and restraint are giving way a little. Waiters and checkout girls are getting a bit ruder, as they are in big cities the world over, and you do sometimes see couples arguing noisily in public. But it’ll be a long time before the value of respect and restraint fades away entirely.
Indonesia’s national emblem is the Garuda—an eagle-like creature from Hindu mythology. It is the embodiment of Pancasila, the national ideology. Bhinneka Tunggal Ika, the Old Javanese phrase on the scroll that the Garuda grips in its claws, is the national motto, literally meaning “different but one”, and usually translated as “unity in diversity”.
Is Indonesia a “Muslim Country”?
Whenever I spot the phrase “the world’s biggest Muslim country”—or worse yet, “the world’s biggest Islamic country”—in a news report about Indonesia I growl and reach for my imaginary copy editor’s pen. To my pedantic mind the correct description should be “the world’s biggest Muslim-majority country”, because that’s precisely what Indonesia is. “Muslim country” or “Islamic country” suggests somewhere like Iran or Pakistan where Islam is enshrined as a state ideology, and where the religion is the dominant decider of social values. But Indonesia’s just not like that.
Inside the Istiqlal Mosque in Jakarta, Indonesia’s biggest place of Muslim worship.
If you’ve ever spent time in other Muslim-majority countries—from Morocco to Bangladesh—you’ll sense a subtle difference as soon as you arrive. It’s not simply that Indonesia is markedly more liberal (although it is generally much more liberal when it comes to the position of women, and social values around boyfriend-girlfriend relationships, for example, than anywhere in the Middle East). There’s also the impression that Islam is not what sets the universal tone of daily life here. Sure, there are mosques and people in obviously “Muslim” dress—and in recent years an increasingly noisy and politically influential Islamist fringe, which some fear is beginning to change Indonesia’s long-famed diversity and tolerance for the worse—but in most big cities there are also bars and girls in short skirts.
Islam is just one of six officially recognized national religions in Indonesia, and though it accounts for by far the biggest chunk of the population (something like 85 percent) there are big swaths in the east of the country which are Christian-majority (plus Bali, where most people are Hindu). And religious minorities tend to be disproportionally represented in major urban populations, as well as being disproportionally represented in the ranks of the middle classes, which gives a certain cosmopolitanism to the modern urban scene. But there’s also a vast diversity within the Muslim population itself—from those who take their faith very seriously indeed, to those for whom it’s nothing more than a word on their identity card. There is a minority of women who adopt conservative Muslim dress, but they’re massively outnumbered by those who match a simple headscarf with skinny jeans, or who wander around in shorts and tee-shirt with their head uncovered.
There are some regions of Indonesia where the local culture is more obviously and conservatively Muslim—the north of Sumatra, for example. But despite a definite conservative trend of late, when it comes to lifestyle and social norms, Indonesia is still often closer to the Buddhist-majority countries of mainland Southeast Asia than to the Middle East. So the next time you spot the phrase “the biggest Muslim country in the world”, reach for your red pen…
RELATIONS WITH THE OUTSIDE WORLD
Here’s the weird thing: almost everyone who visits Indonesia comes away with the impression that it’s one of the friendliest places on the planet; but this ultra-hospitable nation also has a long tradition of prickly relationships with its neighbors and lapses into xenophobic nationalism. It’s probably all down to history. During Indonesia’s early decades of independence from the Netherlands, the flamboyant first president, Sukarno, realized that one of the best ways to bind a vast and diverse nation together was to start a fight with someone else. He started fights with America, with Britain, and above all with Malaysia.
Those days of open confrontation are long gone, but the legacy remains. Nothing starts an Indonesian Twitter-storm more quickly than a perceived insult from a foreign nation. Malaysia, which has a lot in cultural common with Indonesia, comes in for a particularly large amount of flak, and relations with the other big neighbor, Australia, can get pretty testy at times too—over everything from the history of East Timor to the export of beef. None of this ever seems to impact on how most Indonesians respond to individual foreigners, which is refreshing, but that doesn’t mean that race isn’t an issue in Indonesia…