For Fatma Oussedik, an Algerian sociologist and professor at the University of Algiers, authorities' permissiveness towards sheep fights signals a quiet crisis besetting both masculinity and politics.
This sort of contempt for eminences, or rather dread of the labor of ascending them, might have been termed the besetting weakness of the warfare of the period.
There are just a few things it's proper to talk about on Sundays and that is one of them. My besetting sin is imagining too much and forgetting my duties.
However much his influence among his people had been impaired by his occasional and besetting weakness, as well as by his desertion of the tribe, his courage and his fame as an orator were undeniable.