Q: Fear and discomfort, as you say, are equal-opportunity employers now. Yet, are some of us still less equal than others?

A: Certainly, those of dark skin — and maybe especially anyone with a beard or anything that the world vaguely associates with Islam — are constantly a target for “random checks” and free-floating suspicion. But I think such thinking is purely a matter of fear, and fear is a matter of ignorance; in the immediate wake of the 9/11 attacks, many of the victims of hate crimes in the US were Sikhs, who are among the groups most obviously unallied in any way with those who perpetrated the attacks on New York and Washington.

But to a man with a hammer, everything is a nail, and to someone with ignorance or prejudice in his heart, anything is a cause for crazy misunderstanding. Those people who don’t know the world well and just assume that violence comes from people “over there”, will always have a reason to foment their prejudices.

But it does strike me that, in recent years, many other kinds of people have been subjected to the kinds of humiliation that those of us roughly associated with Islam or Asia have become used to. My hope is that perhaps a few of them will begin to understand the silliness of judging someone on the colour of his skin and not the content of his character.

Q: Which, in your opinion, are the most suspicious — or cautious — nations when it comes to travel?

A: For me to start singling out countries that are acting badly would probably be to perpetuate the very prejudices and narrow-mindedness that disturb me! But I do think that isolation is a luxury that few of us can afford, especially in our ever more globally connected world, and the places that are most worrying are the ones that are most ignorant, and the ones that are most ignorant are the ones that tend to barricade themselves within the walls of their own assumptions and not even try to see the world.

I’ll never forget visiting North Korea, for example: I’ve never seen a state so terrifying, precisely because it is so determined not to engage on a human level with most of the rest of the world. So long as the outside world remains an abstraction, it can be attacked and vilified with impunity. But as soon as one actually begins to meet people from other cultures one realises that they don’t begin to live down to our stereotypes or easy assumptions of them.

The North Korean people are, of course, a victim, not a perpetrator of this way of thinking; but I do think that governments that encourage staying away from the world at large are governments that are in some ways condoning a kind of violence. And in a world of ever more apparent economic, environmental and spiritual interdependence, this makes about as much sense as forsaking a crowded forum to live inside a sealed hole.