MOST religions have strictures against suicide. But the theological calculus made by religious leaders often seems to change when communities are in a state of bitter conflict, and people are taking their own lives (and sometimes, but not always, the lives of others) in the apparent hope of furthering their community's cause. Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the globally influential Muslim preacher based in Qatar, has made himself persona non grata in most Western countries by blessing what he calls "martyrdom operations"—in other words, suicide bombing—by Palestinians. "I do not automatically bless martyrdom operations, I bless them only under certain circumstances," he has said, asserting that the Palestinians were a special case because they lacked other weapons. Some Muslim thinkers in the West have rejected this line, saying there should be no exceptions to the Islamic ban on suicide.

During the Northern Irish hunger strikes of three decades ago, the Catholic church was under strong pressure to stop young republican prisoners starving themselves to death. Cardinal Tomas O'Fiaich did try to negotiate an end to hunger strikes, and he had some degree of success, but in the highly-charged climate of the time, he could hardly condemn the strikers without alienating fellow Irish nationalists. "Who is entitled to call him a murderer or a suicide?" he said after one young protester and member of the Irish Republican Army died of self-starvation.

The 109 Tibetan Buddhists who have set fire to themselves since 2009, in protest against Chinese policies, seem an entirely different case: their acts of desperate protest do not harm anybody else, and they are not part of an organisation that practices violence. But self-immolation does pose moral and metaphysical questions for a Tibetan Buddhist. Kirti Rinpoche, a senior abbot who followed his leader, the Dalai Lama, into exile in 1959, was asked about those questions when he came to London today.

In common with all the leaders of the India-based community of exiles, Kirti Rinpoche absolutely denies Chinese allegations that the wave of self-immolations is somehow co-ordinated and encouraged by the Tibetan Buddhist diaspora. Given the degree of Chinese surveillance of Tibet's great monasteries, and the closed-circuit cameras that have been installed in monastic cells, such co-ordination would be physically impossible, he insisted, speaking at the Legatum Insitute, a think-tank.

The self-immolators were acting as individuals, but not in a selfish way; they were acting in a spirit of concern for the entire Tibetan people, the visiting abbot said. While the diaspora would never exhort people to burn themselves, such a desperate act could be seen as having merit from a Buddhist point of view, the abbot thought. It was a deed of self-sacrifice for the good of others. He cited an argument which (as my colleague Banyan has noted) is often used by Tibetan exiles in India: the self-burners are doing something similar to Buddha, who in one of his incarnations offered his body as food for a hungry tigress.

Nor, the abbot stressed, did the self-immolations imply any abandonment of the policy of non-violence of which the Dalai Lama was the guarantor. "The Chinese have a golden opportunity to negotiate while the Dalai Lama is alive...but it sometimes seems that the Chinese are trying to impel the Tibetans to take a course of violence," he said. A colleague who knows Tibet well asked the abbot whether, in his view, the recent self-immolators were motivated by the desire to gain rewards in a future existence. The reply was unexpected: that consideration might have come into play for the older self-burners, but the younger ones had grown up in a communist state, and their world-view was correspondingly more materialist.

In the end, the sort of desperation that drives people to forfeit their own lives may have more to do with their political circumstances than their metaphysical beliefs. That (controversial) argument has been made by Robert Pape, a professor at the University of Chicago, in his study of suicide terrorism. Perhaps it applies to "non-violent" suicides too.

(Photo credit: AFP)