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.