Taking part in recitation is an act of devotion whether you are the one reciting or the one listening. The listener is not a passive audience but a worshipper, so the religious act is shared by both sides of the performance.
The same recitation works at the same time as the core of private devotion, as the thing that gives religious approval to much of social and cultural life, and as an art form valued for its own beauty. Its sacred status does not stop it from being judged and enjoyed as skilled performance.
For believers, the main and most immediate way of meeting the sacred word is hearing it recited aloud, not reading it silently. Outsiders who study it as a set of written texts, the way scholars treat the Bible, miss that it is at heart an oral thing.