PirateNeilsouth: Why not just have it as a choice?, allow the player to remove it if it deems offensive!
hanns.g: Because CDPr wanted pretty, oriental rugs, not prayer rugs. It didn't fit their design standards.
This is exactly it, as far as I can tell. It's not so much about offense, because clearly CDP has no problems putting lots of controversial topics in their game. It has lots of nudity, sex, foul language, racism and politics. If they wanted an islamic prayer rug there, I'm sure they would have put it there and not care about what anything says. The point is that they didn't realise they put a prayer rug there, and wanted just a generic exotic rug. So, made aware of their (really minor, but easily fixable) mistake, they fixed it.
Perhaps they should have phrased it differently in the patch notes. That would have saved a lot of crap over nothing.