Brighton Pavilion: Sacrilege?

I’m just in the middle of watching a BBC programme, Abroad Again in Britain, about Brighton Pavilion, an oriental folly in Brighton built by King George IV. The presenter makes much of the incongruity of the architecture with the interior decor – Indian and mock-Chinese respectively, with the latter including the so-called Chinese Willow Pattern, invented in the “Chinese province of Stoke on Trent”.

With regard to the architecture, Jonathan Meades calls the “Islamic” copying a “sacrilegious joke” against Islam, comparing it with the use of Islamic names – Alhambra, Granada, Mecca – for places of purely secular (and thoroughly decadent) pleasure. He compares it to lifting a work in a foreign language which one doesn’t understand, because one likes the sound of it. I’m not sure if I’m the only Muslim who doesn’t usually find the use of these names and designs for such purposes offensive?

OK, so Mecca for bingo may offend people, but can anyone suggest that this was its purpose? Mecca is commonly used in English to mean a place where people gather. As for the Alhambra, it was a palace, and Granada is a city – these are not religious references, and the courts of the Sultans were never places Muslims went in search of pious company or religious knowledge, were they?