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This article introduces the themes of this special edition, presenting the case that the history of Spanish anarchism needs to be situated within a broader, international history of the left. This view helps to disrupt the image of anarchism as 'exceptional', without losing sight of its specific manifestation in Spain. It proceeds to outline the five articles that make up the remainder of the edition.

This article investigates the anarchist understanding of fascism during the Second Republic, and particularly during the abstention campaign of 1933, when the practice of radicals in the National Confederation of Labour (CNT) has been described as ‘ultra-left’ in view of its sectarianism and insistence on the need for an insurrectionary response to the threat of the right. The article explores the comparison made to the German Communist Party (KPD) during the so-called ‘Third Period’, and the lessons that anarchists in Spain attempted to draw from the rise of Hitler.

A commentator on Muhammad Iqbal, the great poet-philosopher of.Muslim India, once wrote that ‘Pan-Islamism is not actually defined anywhere’. If true, it has not been through want of trying. Since the term ‘Pan-Islamism’ became common currency in the late nineteenth century, a variety of European journalists, colonial officials and academic researchers (not to mention Muslims themselves) have striven to offer a precise interpretation of the phenomenon. But they have failed to develop any consensus, even on basic questions: what was Pan-Islamism? why was it? or even, has it ever existed? Some have considered it an essentially religious drive, others as a political mobilisation. Some observers have presented it as a movement, as a disciplined, and perhaps clandestine, organisation with active members and fixed purposes. Others have dismissed it as mere sentiment, as nothing more than the vaguest of emotional attachments between co-religionists. A number, believing that Pan-Islamism seeks to re-create a past perfection, have argued that it aims to regroup Muslims under one sovereign authority much as they had enjoyed during the Prophet's lifetime. Others, on the other hand, have sensed more modern connotations, claiming that it intends to forge an exclusive international federation of Islamic states with the very real potential for threatening non-Muslim countries. At least one Marxist writer has distinguished between ‘progressive’ and ‘reactionary’ strains.3 This suggests that Pan-Islamism might both nurture the longings for some distant past and be responsive to the demands of the present.