In the present explanation, “aẓfār” still signifies actual claws as a lexical item, and “al-maniyyah” still means death. The imaginative feature lies not necessarily in a separate transferred dictionary sense for either word but in the mental act of attributing claws to death.
Two questions should therefore be kept apart:
Has each individual word changed its assigned meaning? That is not established for each term here.
Has the speaker ascribed a physically impossible property to a nonphysical thing? Yes; this creates the imaginative relation.
This account treats both labels as connected with acts of meaning construction. Other rhetorical schools locate the borrowing differently, so it should not be presented as the only historical account.