Is There a Copula in Arabic?

At some point a pronoun became a copula and it's still used in both ways. It's quite interesting to see how all these different kinds of words just lose their identity and become a basic copula. And that can be the most interesting if you want to apply this to a conlang because you can give evidence, sort of show your work by giving evidence of what the historical source was. But even far from the originating situation, little bits of the history of the originating verb will hang out like Spanish estar which no longer means literally to stand.