I’m not trying to be disrespectful to mosques in any way, and yes, I know they’re not allowed to use pictures so they resort to geometrical patterns. But still, when I look at images like this, something just feels ‘off’ – much like it does when you look at a haunted house. It just feels sort of otherworldly and unsettling to me. And the feeling is baked in to the visuals. It does not feel like it comes from a human world.
The same goes for something like this tbh:
Especially if I encountered it outside a church, it would really creep me out. It feels like it wants to bite me.
Not really. Some mosques incorporate imagery inspired by Quranic verses describing landscapes or scenery from heaven, but Islamic heaven is just gardens, rivers of honey, milk and wine, grand white or gold buildings and castles. So a mosque which incorporates them would look more natural and less “intimidating”, nothing like the one in the picture. A mosque which fits that description is the Umayyad mosque.
Mosques are decorated this way most of the time because they’re “houses of God”. So they nearly always incorporate Quranic verses and names of God in specific calligraphy styles of Arabic, use “preferred colors” of Islam: white, black, green, red, dark blue, dark brown, and look luxurious and abstract.