KABUL, AFGHANISTAN - The young women stepped off the bus and moved toward the protest march just beginning on the other side of the street when they were spotted by a mob of men.

"Get out of here, you whores!" the men shouted.

The women scattered as the men moved in.

"We want our rights!" one of the women shouted, turning to face them. "We want equality!"

The women dove back into the bus and it rumbled away, with the men smashing the taillights and banging on the sides.

But the march continued anyway. About 300 Afghan women, facing an angry throng three times larger than their own, walked the streets of the capital on Wednesday to demand that Parliament repeal a new law that introduces Taliban-like restrictions on women, and permits, among other things, marital rape.

It was an extraordinary scene. Women are mostly illiterate in this impoverished country, and they do not, generally speaking, enjoy anything near the freedom accorded to men. But there they were, most of them young, many in jeans, defying a threatening crowd and calling out slogans heavy with meaning.

With the Afghan police keeping the mob at bay, the women walked 2 miles to Parliament, where they delivered a petition calling for the law's repeal.

"Whenever a man wants sex, we cannot refuse," said Fatima Husseini, 26, one of the marchers. "It means a woman is a kind of property, to be used by the man in any way that he wants."

The law, approved by both houses of Parliament and signed by President Hamid Karzai, applies only to the Shiite minority, essentially giving clerics authority over intimate matters between women and men. Women here and governments and rights groups abroad have protested three parts of the law especially.

One provision makes it illegal for a woman to resist her husband's sexual advances. A second provision requires a husband's permission for a woman to work outside the home or go to school. And a third makes it illegal for a woman to refuse to "dress up" if that is what her husband wants.

The passage of the law has amounted to something of a historical irony. Afghan Shiites, who make up close to 20 percent of the population, suffered horrendously under the Taliban, who regarded them as apostates. Rights advocates say the law could influence a proposed family law for the Sunni majority and a draft law on violence against women.

Karzai, who relies on vast support from Western governments to stay in power, has come under international criticism for signing the bill into law. Many people here suspect that he did so in order to gain the favor of the Shiite clergy; Karzai is up for reelection this year.

Responding to the outcry, Karzai has begun looking for a way to remove the most controversial parts of the law.

The women who protested Wednesday began their demonstration with what appeared to be a deliberately provocative act. They gathered in front of the School of the Last Prophet, a madrasa run by Ayatollah Asif Mohsini, the country's most powerful Shiite cleric.

"We are here to campaign for our rights," one woman said into a megaphone.

The reaction was immediate. Hundreds of students from the madrasa, most but not all of them men, poured into the streets to confront the demonstrators.

"Death to the enemies of Islam!" the counterdemonstrators cried, encircling the women. "We want Islamic law!"

The women stared ahead and marched.

A phalanx of police officers, some of them women, held the crowds apart.

Afterward, one of the madrasa's senior clerics said the dispute was between professionals and nonprofessionals; that is, between the clerics, who understood the Qur'an and Islamic law, and the women calling for the law's repeal who did not.

"It's like if you are sick, you go to a doctor, not some amateur," said the cleric, Mohammed Hussein Jafaari. "This law was approved by the scholars."

The scholars, Jafaari conceded, were all men.

Lingering awhile, Jafaari said that what was really driving the dispute was the foreigners who loomed so large over the country. "We Afghans don't want a bunch of NATO commanders and foreign ministers telling us what to do."