Being an intellectual is defined by directive and educative function, not education level.

Evidence

That all members of a political party should be regarded as intellectuals is an affirmation that can easily lend itself to mockery and caricature. But if one thinks about it nothing could be more exact. There are of course distinctions of level to be made. A party might have a greater or lesser proportion of members in the higher grades or in the lower, but this is not the point. What matters is the function, which is directive and organisational, i.e. educative, i.e. intellectual. A tradesman does not join a political party in order to do business, nor an industrialist in order to produce more at lower cost, nor a peasant to learn new methods of cultivation, even if some aspects of these demands of the tradesman, the industrialist or the peasant can find satisfaction in the party. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 296

Categorization

• DEFINE: Load-bearing definition of the intellectual not by credential but by directive/educative function — central to Gramsci’s whole theory and to how later Islamophobia readings understand who ‘produces’ common sense.
• XREF: Directly feeds the Islamophobia toolkit: anyone performing directive-educative work (pundits, TV hosts, teachers) counts as an intellectual regardless of formal position.