DURING the fasting month, in my village when I was a kid we used to spend the hours before breaking the fast, in a mosque near the river. In the room on the left an adult would be teaching Qur'an reading, and in the pauses every few minutes we would sing phrases often called "praise" to God.

Basically, the sung phrases were just memorized admonitions and advice. I remember one of them that was a little odd. It went, in Javanese:

Ing donya sugih