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Rainer Specht, in an essay on Alfred North Whitehead's interpretation of John Locke, develops a schema of six forms of authorial presence.  The purpose is to explain how Locke was present to Whitehead, although Whitehead misunderstood and misquoted Locke in many ways (which is the main theme of the paper).  These forms are: Institutional presence .  "In this case, the institution, for reasons that can be reconstructed, identifies itself with an author to such an extent that an attack on him is also an attack on the institution that needs to be punished politically or through disciplinary sanctions."  The examples Specht gives are St. Thomas Aquinas in the Roman Catholic Church (at least, for many centuries) and Karl Marx in the Soviet Union.  (This essay comes from a book published in 1990, just before the fall of the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall: the back-cover blurb highlights that it is mainly the work of authors from West Germany.)  We might also t...

 In the Islamic tradition, the Qur'an is the center of everything, for it is believed to be the very word of God, the uncreated word of God, in human speech.  Muhammad was not its author, but rather its transmitter, the channel through which it came to men.  Every single word in it was directly told him by God, and he wrote it all down precisely; this is in contrast to the Catholic view of Scripture, which was written both  by God and men, the divine Author and the human authors.   Yet Islam does not treat Muhammad simply as a channel: he was also a prophet, and the final prophet, "the capstone of the prophets," whose example and practice ( sunnah ) should be followed.  This sunnah  is not contained in the uncreated Qur'an, though; instead, it is passed down by tradition, by word of mouth, by the sayings of and about Muhammad, the hadith . What is unique about the Islamic use of hadith  is the chains of succession each has, the isnad.   ...