Repentance‐driven fitness: Moral striving in a Tunisian context

Abstract How do Islamic moral‐spiritual meaning systems shape motivations for fitness consumption, and why do they sustain ongoing moral striving? Drawing on 13 months of ethnography and 17 interviews in a Tunisian gym, we show how Muslim gymgoers often interpret exercise through Tawba, the Islamic practice of repentance and return. Diet lapses, missed sessions, and bodily discomfort are folded into a recurring cycle of renewed intention, effort, and moral self‐correction. This cycle also reshapes fitness capital. Effort gains legitimacy when read as sincere, modest, and restrained, while display‐oriented practices such as selfies, branded visibility, and transformation narratives can become morally suspect. Coaches and peers stabilize these judgments by making bodily work socially legible. The findings extend goal‐striving research by showing how religious meaning systems sustain persistence through repeated moral return, where fitness becomes valuable through proper orientation as much as visible progress.