ABSTRACT
In The Satanic Verses, published at the end of the 1980s, Salman Rushdie relates a story in which the Archangel Gibreel conveys a mischievously mistranslated revelation to Mahound (Muhammad), a "businessman turned prophet" who believes only in Allah. Rushdie's tale of Mahound offers a remarkable metaphor for certain aspects of the uneven global development that succeeded the postwar era and is ever more viscerally evident in the 1990s. There is no doubt that the language of globalization that has captured the public imagination, but the contemporary transnationalism of goods and bodies, cultures and information represents a trenchant continuity with processes and patterns of uneven development. The paradigm of modernization has been reinvented as globalization, but they both issue from the same mouth. The global restructuring of the 1980s and 1990s embodies not so much an evening out of social and economic development levels across the globe as a deepening and reorganization of existing patterns of uneven geographical development.
