This paper explores the connections between devotion to the Imam ‘Ali al-Riza (d. 818) and the cultivation of ambiguity in the personae of Persian poets. Its main source is Maliha Samarqandi’s Muzakkir al-Ashab (completed in Samarqand, ca. 1693), a tazkira (“remembrance”) of poets that comprises accounts of contemporaneous poets’ lives (most of whom Maliha had met) alongside citations from their verses. These accounts include a number of poets who elude being known in various ways - for instance, through their refusal to identify as either Sunni or Shi‘i. I argue that Maliha invests the ambiguity of these poets with positive significance, such that ambiguity does not simply result in opacity. Rather, the poets’ eluding being known in certain terms enables their being known in other terms. In particular, I demonstrate that the lived devotion of a number of these poets to Imam al-Riza is one way in which Maliha marks their personae without defining or circumscribing them. A growing body of modern scholarship has worked to qualify an older scholarly narrative of political and sectarian rupture in the Persianate in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, following the establishment of the Safavid dynasty in Iran in 1501 and their promotion of Shi‘ism. One productive way of demonstrating the functioning of the Persianate as a sphere of exchange extending across political and sectarian lines has been to trace the circulation of Persian literati across these lines (cf. for example Szuppe, 2004). This paper draws upon and aims to contribute to this scholarship, by considering the question of what made it possible for the high mobility of Persian literati to result in not only transregional encounters, but affiliation and intimacy. It finds that the cultivation of ambiguity by poets enabled new modes of sociability, cemented by shared understandings that include the widely-held and deeply felt sense (irreducible to readings as either Sunni or Shi‘i) of the sacred power and significance of the Imams. As such, this meaningful ambiguity asks to be read as both informed by and formative of the Persianate ecumene.