The claim that a book is not merely a repository of teaching but is itself the living Guru is unusual enough among world religions that comparison with related but distinct claims elsewhere clarifies exactly what is being asserted.
Islamic theology holds that the Qur'an is the uncreated speech of God, a position that generated the ninth-century Mihna controversy when the Abbasid state attempted to impose the opposing Mu'tazili view that the Qur'an was created; but even the strongest classical Sunni position treats the Qur'an as God's speech rather than as a personal successor to Muhammad's prophetic authority, and Islam has no ceremony in which the book is bowed to as a person, awakened in the morning and put to rest at night. The distinction matters: reverence for scripture as divine communication is common across traditions, but the Sikh doctrine goes further, asserting personal succession, that the Guru Granth Sahib simply is the tenth Guru's living successor holding the office the nine human Gurus held before it, not merely inspired writing to be revered.
A closer structural parallel exists within Judaism's veneration of the Torah scroll, dressed, crowned, kissed and carried in procession, treated with a reverence approaching that shown a person; but Jewish law and theology do not describe the scroll as a successor authority replacing a line of human leaders, or invest it with the specific institutional powers, issuing binding communal directives through the hukamnama, that the Guru Granth Sahib holds. What is distinctively Sikh is the deliberate act of succession itself, a living authority formally transferred from a person to a text at a specific historical moment, rather than a gradually developing reverence for an already-existing scripture.