The response to him is:

You have not established that he commands them. Your predecessors merely stated that he is beloved to them, meaning that they love to resemble him. Even granting that he commands them, you have offered no evidence that their being commanded entails their being owned, except your statement:

“There is no servitude over and above their essence; rather, those very entities are constituted through servitude.”

This is a bare assertion. Why could it not be said that such servitude is additional to their essence?

As for your statement, “They are constituted through servitude”: if you mean that they are constituted through their service, which consists of their obedience and motion, this is Aristotle’s claim, whose shortcomings have already been explained. And supposing that their reality is that very motion, this would in fact imply that motion is a condition of their existence.

If, however, by their being constituted through servitude you mean that they are constituted through Allah Most High having created them, that is precisely what remains to be proved, and you have offered no argument for it.

Moreover, your statement, “It is known that the one who commands them is other than they are, and that he is not a body, because if he were a body he would be one of them,” contains no proof, for two reasons:

First: he subjects the intellects to his control, yet it does not follow that he is one of the intellects subjected to control. Why, then, if he subjects bodies to his control, must he be one of the bodies