The Arab, Arabic, or Arabian mile (Arabic: الميل, al-mīl) was a historical Arabic unit of length. Its precise length is disputed, lying between 1,800 metres (5,900 ft) and 2,000 metres (6,600 ft). It was used by medieval Arab geographers and astronomers. The predecessor of the modern nautical mile, it extended the Roman mile to fit an astronomical approximation of 1 minute of an arc of latitude measured along a north–south meridian. The distance between two pillars whose latitudes differed by 1 degree in a north–south direction was measured using sighting pegs along a flat desert plane.
There were 4,000 cubits in an Arabic mile. If al-Farghani used the legal cubit as his unit of measurement, then an Arabic mile was 1,995 meters long. If he used al-Ma'mun's surveying cubit, it was 1,925 meters long or 1.04 nautical miles (1.93 km)[1]
During the Umayyad period (661–750), the "Umayyad mile" was roughly equivalent to 2,285 metres (7,497 ft), or a little more than 2 kilometres (6,600 ft), or about 2 biblical miles, for every Umayyad mile.[2]
Kennedy was invoked but never defined (see the help page).