Mainly, the holy Quran is the holy book for all Muslims. Reading the holy Quran is a special reading with rules. Reading the Holy Quran is called recitation. One of the Muslim essential activities is reading or listening to the Holy Quran. In this paper, a machine learning approach for recognizing the reader of the holy Quran (reciter) is proposed. The proposed system contains basic traditional phases for a recognition system, including data acquisition, pre-processing, feature extraction, and classification. A dataset is created for ten well-known reciters. The reciters are the prayer leaders in the holy mosques in Mecca and Madinah. The audio dataset set is analyzed using the Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC). Both the K nearest neighbor (KNN) classifier, and the artificial neural network (ANN) classifier are applied for classification purpose. The pitch is used as features which are utilized to train the ANN and the KNN for classification. Two chapters from the Holy Quran are selected in this paper for system validation. Excellent accuracy is achieved. Using the ANN, the proposed system gives 97.62% accuracy for chapter 18 and 96.7% accuracy for chapter 36. On the other hand, the proposed system gives 97.03% accuracy for chapter 18 and 96.08% accuracy for chapter 36 by using the KNN.