A head scarf became a symbol of backwardness, of being uneducated and under pressure from conservative husbands.
One of the right-wing tropes about Islam in Europe, which is making alarming inroads into the mainstream, is that it represents a "culture of backwardness, of retardedness, of barbarism" and has made no contribution to Western civilization.
For every story about feudalism, caste repression and the ongoing backwardness of a largely rural country, Mr Das counters with optimism about a bright, fast-rising, urban middle class.
I kept waiting for him to catch my eye in the middle of one of his clinical descriptions and shake his head over the backwardness of a society obsessed with virginity and prostitution.
Most of "The Known World," which takes its title with irony from a 300-year-old map and reflects the backwardness of such a document, is set on Henry's plantation.
From time to time, he would break into pidgin English to drive home a political point about the backwardness of Africa or the corruption of its leaders.
Alex Zoghlin, chief technology officer of Orbitz, a travel Web site started last spring by a consortium of airlines, attributed the relative backwardness of reservations technology until recently to the airline industry's reluctance to invest in it.
For Bin Laden, as for the grand masters of the Assassins, the technical backwardness of the Middle East is not a hindrance but a tremendous opportunity.
Starting from the assumption that blasphemy can exist only in a backward society, critics point to blasphemy as evidence of the backwardness of entire religious cultures.
Is he ready to lead America?" ACCURACY -- The advertisement is a compendium of the accusations about the backwardness of life in Texas under Mr. Bush that the Gore campaign has made a cornerstone of its effort to defeat him.
