KABUL – When she slips off her veil and dons Nike trainers for her daily basketball game at a Kabul gym, Sabrina Sagheb is already challenging many orthodoxies of Afghan society.

She will challenge many more when she becomes the youngest woman to stand in Afghanistan’s first parliamentary elections on September 18.

The 25-year-old with a talent for shooting hoops will contest a seat in the lower house, the Wolesi Jirga.

This is a courageous decision in a country where it is still socially unacceptable in many areas for women to leave home without the company of a male relative and the anonymity of a burka.

Moreover, Ms. Sagheb will campaign on a platform of liberal reform and equality for the sexes. She hopes to make the wearing of the burka a matter of choice for all women and advocates an end to forced marriages.

“I want basic human rights for men and for women,” she said, adding that her parents will let her choose a husband.

Some 5,805 candidates have been declared eligible to contest the first post-Taliban parliamentary polls. A total of 2,778 candidates will stand for the 249-seat lower house and 3,027 in provincial councils. Some 583 women will run.

The elections have already been postponed from April and will take place against a background of mounting Taliban violence and instability.

Ms. Sagheb is the minimum legal age for candidacy. In a country where female literacy is 14%, she is exceptional in being a fluent English speaker and a university graduate.

She escaped the Taliban bar on female education because her family fled to the relative permissiveness of Iran. Despite her youth, she is already the head of the Afghan Basketball Federation and an International Olympic Committee representative. She works for an international NGO.

Shaima Reyazee, a 24-year-old presenter on an MTV-style channel that was repeatedly denounced by the religious establishment for its Western attitudes, was murdered in her Kabul home in May. Ms. Sagheb acknowledges that, by standing, she could face similar danger. She hopes that, in the face of male aggression, she can deploy less confrontational devices.

“Softness, kindness, and subtlety are our weapons,” she said. “In the office where I work, the women have faced problems from male colleagues, and we won our rights by using these means.”

Other candidates include former Taliban leaders, who advocate strict adherence to Islamic Sharia law and the gender roles of Afghan cultural tradition.

Conservatives have been angered by the automatic allocation of 25% of seats to women candidates following international pressure for greater representation of women.

“This is eating the rights of men,” an engineer and Wolesi Jirga candidate, Ahmed Shah Ahmedzai, said.

“We will never accept the interpretation of democracy in our Islamic republic that the West is trying to implement in Afghanistan.”

A former Taliban commander who is standing for election but declined to be named said: “We will give only those rights to women which are contained in Sharia law.”