The Arabic word usually translated as "worship" is "ibada", which literally means "service" and implies a relationship of a servant to a master. In this case, God is the master and the human being is the servant.

But the important thing for me is that worship is not for God's sake. He has no need of it. But we do. As human beings, we are often forgetful, shortsighted, careless. We get caught up in the immediate or the pleasurable and forget to take the larger view. So we need a reminder. And this is considered to be one of the main purposes of prayer in Islam, as a remembrance.

And the point I was trying to convey (which I may not have been clear enough about) is that for Muslims, there is a very, very clear distinguishing between the Creator and the created. To us, it does not make sense to treat the two the same when they are not comparable. And since worship is meant to remind us of this same thing in regard to ourselves (that is, the relationship between us and our Creator), then it would seem to make the most sense to direct this activity to God and not to something that is also part of God's creation.

I'm suspecting that we are working from different ideas of what worship is or what its purpose is.