Your typical American yahoo believes that under the skin many if not most Islamics are radical anti-Americans who have to be guarded against and certainly can’t be trusted. A more benevolent, open-hearted view is that we’re all God’s children and we have to accept our differences. Sean Stone, 27 year-old son of director Oliver Stone, belongs to the latter camp. He announced today from Iran, where he’s shooting a documentary, that he’s converted to Islam.

This is the kind of thing that bright willful types sometimes do in their 20s. Stone is trying to define himself. What matters in the end is blood, and Stone is half-Christian and half-Jewish so this is a phase — a “statement.” He’ll be sipping martinis with super-models in Paris next year or the year after. I met him once at a party in Manhattan. He believes in passion, wildness and the search for ecstasy by way of truth.

“The conversion to Islam is not abandoning Christianity or Judaism, which I was born with,” Stone said in a telephone call from the central Iranian city of Isfahan, where he underwent the ceremony. “It means I have accepted Mohammad and other prophets.” According to Iran’s Fars news agency, Stone had become a Shiite and had chosen to be known by the Muslim first name Ali.