Imagine working your hardest to pass an exam — and then having the top marks you achieve given to another student whose religious beliefs are more "acceptable", while you are left with their far lower grade.

For members of the Ahmadiyya Muslim community in countries such as Pakistan, Indonesia and Bangladesh, such scenarios are far from uncommon, according to Nadia Mahmood.

The 28-year-old Canadian mother-of-one, who lives in Devonshire, will give a talk at Amnesty International's annual general meeting this evening with husband Saadat, 33, in which they will describe the ongoing persecution of members of their Islamic sect.

The grade-swapping example actually happened to Mrs. Mahmood's uncle in Pakistan — but members of her husband's family have suffered far worse.

Last month, a distant relative of Mr. Mahmood's, Shiraz Ahmad Bajwa, 37, and his wife Noreen Bajwa, 28, were tortured and suffocated in Multan, Pakistan, because they were Ahmadis. The couple, both doctors, were expecting their first child.

Mrs. Mahmood said: "A lot of it has to do with politics, with extremist religious groups that want to exert pressure on the government so they can introduce their own extreme ideas of what they think Islam should be."

The Ahmadiyya sect, a branch of Sunni Islam, began in 1889 and now has a membership running into tens of millions of people in 185 countries.

Bermuda has just five Ahmadis — Mrs. Mahmood, her husband, her brother-in-law and a couple from Mauritius. They gather together each Friday for prayer and have encountered no negativity on the Island for their beliefs.

"I have gone to the mosque in Hamilton and everyone has been really nice to me there," said Mrs. Mahmood. "We have been really received well here."

The stay-at-home mom, whose daughter Khadijah is aged almost 17 months, was born in Toronto and encountered little prejudice there, even when she began wearing the traditional hijab head cover while at university, just before the 9/11 attacks in New York.

She recalls a trip to Karachi in 2005 when she suddenly realised "that everybody else around me looked like me. I disappeared. I was part of a community".

Ironically, it was there that a cousin told her not to mention that she was Ahmadi, because the sect had been outlawed by the authorities, with members castigated as Islamic impostors.

Amnesty executive director Lucy Attride-Stirling said she invited the couple, both local members of the charity, to give the talk because of the importance of raising awareness about any persecution, be it religious, political or ethnic.

It will take place at 7 p.m. tonight in the boardroom of Bermuda Chamber of Commerce at Albuoy's Point, Hamilton.