Tom Holland’s diary: Fighting jihadism with Mohammed, and bowling the Crown Prince of Udaipur

As weather bombs brew in the north Atlantic, I’m roughing it by heading off to Rajasthan, and the literary festival where you are most likely to be greeted by an elephant. The life of a writer is rarely glamorous, but for one week in January — should an invitation to Jaipur be forthcoming — it decidedly is. The festival is to India what a Richard Curtis film is to London: a fusion of all the fondest stereotypes that foreigners have of a place. The talks, which run the gamut from the Mahabharata to the future of the novel, are pure literary masala. The parties are visions of perfumed candles, shimmering saris and maharajas’ palaces. The last time I was in Jaipur, there was even a cricket match. Needless to say, we were greeted at the ground by dancing girls, our captain rode out to the toss on a camel, and I got to bowl the Crown Prince of Udaipur. It’s that kind of a bash.

There will doubtless be much talk in Jaipur of the Charlie Hebdo murders. India, after all, is simultaneously the most religious country in the world and the cradle of Salman Rushdie. Three years ago, the literature festival was almost derailed by a row over The Satanic Verses. Meanwhile, in Egypt, President Sisi has lamented that ‘Muslims have antagonised the entire world’, while in Xinjiang, China’s westernmost province, the authorities have banned the burka. Tensions in Europe between state and religion are part of a global trend.

The shootings in Paris demonstrated in the most brutal fashion possible an aspect of Islam that lots of people in the West struggle to understand: the love that most Muslims feel for Mohammed. It can strike many of us as odd that the adherents of a religion founded on opposition to idolatry should so enshrine a mortal man, and that cartoons of their prophet should provoke more indignation than those of their god.