Author’s abstract: For the discrete linear systems resulted from the discretization of the one-dimensional anisotropic spatial fractional diffusion equations of variable coefficients with the shifted finite-difference formulas of the Grünwald-Letnikov type, we propose a class of respectively scaled Hermitian and skew-Hermitian splitting iteration method and establish its asymptotic convergence theory. The corresponding induced matrix splitting preconditioner, through further replacements of the involved Toeplitz matrices with certain circulant matrices, leads to an economic variant that can be executed by fast Fourier transforms. Both theoretical analysis and numerical implementations show that this fast respectively scaled Hermitian and skew-Hermitian splitting preconditioner can significantly improve the computational efficiency of the Krylov subspace iteration methods employed as effective linear solvers for the target discrete linear systems.