The New York Times has a report on France’s struggles to curb extremist Muslim clerics.

Mr. Bouziane has preached at several mosques in and around Lyon since arriving in France from Algeria in 1979. After a six-month stint in Saudi Arabia, he began preaching at the Vénissieux mosque, an unassuming gray concrete box a block from the town’s largest housing development.

The imam’s extreme views were well known among Muslims in the region and drew the attention of the local authorities last year after he reportedly issued a fatwa, or religious edict, calling for jihad against American interests in France.

The Interior Ministry issued an expulsion order in February, but did not immediately execute it. Then, in early April, a local publication, Lyon Mag, published an interview with Mr. Bouziane in which he spoke about his support for the Koran’s teaching that adulterous women should be stoned and that it was a man’s right to strike his wife if she was unfaithful.

“He shouldn’t hit her in the face, but aim lower, the legs or stomach,” he said in the interview, adding that a man can hit hard to instill fear in his wife.

France’s national press picked up the article, and within days the Interior Ministry executed the expulsion order. Mr. Bouziane was put on a plane to Algiers, where he was apparently detained for questioning.

But the expulsion drew sharp criticism from many Muslims across France, who saw it as part of a broader attack on Muslims by the French state. The country has recently issued a law banning girls from wearing Muslim veils at school, for example.

In the housing projects near Mr. Bouziane’s mosque, a young man with a closely cropped beard said he thought that the cleric had done nothing wrong. “If my wife cheats on me, I have the right to correct her,” he said, “and not just with a slap on the bottom, but with a gunshot.”