Hisham died in February 743 and Maslama led the funeral prayers.[15] Al-Walid acceded to the caliphate and immediately ordered that Hisham's sons at Rusafa, near Palmyra, be arrested by their cousin al-Abbas ibn al-Walid, but expressly forbade that Maslama or his household be disturbed in deference to their old companionship and Maslama's defense of al-Walid from Caliph Hisham.[6][16] Al-Walid's endearment and generosity toward Maslama is noted in the poems preserved by al-Isfahani.[17] Although he avoided arrest by al-Walid, nothing is heard of him in the sources thereafter and the historian Clifford Edmund Bosworth presumes he may have been executed by the Abbasids during the massacre of the Umayyad family at the river of Antipatris (Nahr Abi Futrus in Arabic) in 750, following the Umayyad dynasty's collapse in the Abbasid Revolution.[5]