{"id":913,"date":"2005-01-15T19:01:32","date_gmt":"2005-01-15T18:01:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/ijwp\/mt.php\/2005\/01\/15\/brighton_pavilion_sacrilege"},"modified":"2005-01-15T19:01:32","modified_gmt":"2005-01-15T18:01:32","slug":"brighton_pavilion_sacrilege","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/mt.php\/2005\/01\/15\/brighton_pavilion_sacrilege","title":{"rendered":"Brighton Pavilion: Sacrilege?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m just in the middle of watching a BBC programme, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/bbcfour\/documentaries\/features\/abroad-again.shtml\">Abroad Again in Britain<\/a>, 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 &#8211; Indian and mock-Chinese respectively, with the latter including the so-called Chinese Willow Pattern, invented in the &#8220;Chinese province of Stoke on Trent&#8221;.<br \/>\n<!--more--><br \/>\nWith regard to the architecture, Jonathan Meades calls the &#8220;Islamic&#8221; copying a &#8220;sacrilegious joke&#8221; against Islam, comparing it with the use of Islamic names &#8211; Alhambra, Granada, Mecca &#8211; for places of purely secular (and thoroughly decadent) pleasure.  He compares it to lifting a work in a foreign language which one doesn&#8217;t understand, because one likes the sound of it.  I&#8217;m not sure if I&#8217;m the only Muslim who doesn&#8217;t usually find the use of these names and designs for such purposes offensive?<\/p>\n<p>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 &#8211; 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?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;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&#46;&#46;&#46;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-913","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p17bgV-eJ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/913","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=913"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/913\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=913"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=913"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=913"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}