A persistent bipolarity exists in the new global thinking: that democratic forces claim for democracy and human rights and that Islamic activists claim for justice (meaning social justice by the will of God). In fact, even during the Cold War, when the world was divided into two blocks, capitalism versus communism, the supporters of democracy were already facing the supporters of social justice. This article underlines why, since 1991, the elites of the new Central Asian independent states were not inclined to implement the Western values that the West insistently tried to bring them. Apparently isolated from the rest of the Muslim Community by the iron curtain, the Central Asian states have demonstrated there was in fact a specific pattern of Islamic persistency within the Soviet ideological frame that rested on an original compromise, which was unknown to the West. This social contract between Muslim leaders and the Soviet Communist party was mostly made in order to fight political Islam which was gaining influence from the end of the 1980s. For both, the political enemy was first the capitalist West, with its attribute of democracy, and second, radical Islam that wanted to get rid of the official Muslim leaders as they were “sold to the atheistic regime”. With the collapse of the Soviet system, the newly independent Central Asian ex-Soviet leaders were faced with a harsh challenge: working together with their former Western enemy to build the so-called market economy with its democratic values. They became very rich, losing the legitimacy given them by the Soviet ideology of social justice which, in turn, became the basic claim of the Islamic movements. Since 9/11 the fight between democracy and justice is as contested as ever; only the borders of each block have changed. We all live now under the global threat of small- or large-scale tragedies, the “fear industry”, as French sociologist Michel Wieworka wrote in 2003. After fifteen years of independence, the first political overthrow occurred in Kyrgyzstan in March 2005 in the name of justice without any reference to Islam. The turmoil currently taking place in Uzbekistan has a greater link between Islam and justice.