Which of the following ideas was questioned by people from the seventh century…

Concept

A society can decide a person's status and privileges in two contrasting ways. Under an ASCRIBED system, status is fixed at birth by the family, lineage, or caste one is born into and cannot be earned. Under an ACHIEVED system, a person's worth follows from their own devotion, conduct, and effort. Reform-minded religious teachers characteristically reject ascribed, birth-based status and argue that a person's spiritual and social worth should be earned rather than inherited.

Application

From the seventh century CE, Bhakti saints (devoted to a personal god) and later Sufi teachers of Islam applied exactly this outlook in the Indian setting. Holding that devotion and conduct — not caste or lineage — should determine a person's spiritual and social worth, the belief they set out to question was the specific claim that the social privileges a person enjoys are a rightful consequence of their birth.

Cross-check

• The idea that living beings undergo rebirth was a long-standing, widely accepted belief of the period covering all living beings, not humans alone, so it was not itself the belief under question.

• The idea that all human beings are equal at birth was affirmed by these devotional teachers rather than challenged by them — they upheld equal spiritual standing, so it was not the idea they were questioning.

• The idea that personal effort or devotion could lead a person toward liberation from the rebirth cycle was actively promoted by Bhakti saints and other Indic ascetic traditions of this period that accepted the doctrine of rebirth, unlike Sufi teaching — so it was not something they cast doubt on.

So the idea questioned by these teachers from the seventh century onwards was that social privileges follow from a person's birth.